Now, TikTok shows it clearly: its Chinese employees can access the personal data of French users. This is stated in a blog post by Elaine Fox, TikTok’s director of privacy in Europe. The Chinese app TikTok updates its privacy policy, thus confirming that its Chinese and other staff have access to the data of European and therefore French users.
TikTok claims to do this to make the platform experience “reliable, enjoyable, and secure,” specifies this same blog post. The data could be used to improve the performance of recommendation algorithms and to detect automated accounts.
formalized practice
Last July, questioned by Tech&Co, TikTok did not deny the existence of data transfer to China. Thus, the social network argued that the data sent is “limited” without going into more detail. This practice, which will be included as of December 2 in the privacy policy, did not appear officially until now.
A Buzzfeed article, published in June, based on wiretaps of Chinese TikTok employees, claimed that engineers have access to comments written below videos, video “likes” or accounts followed by each user. They would also have access to basic information such as the identifier, the email address or even the age of the user. In its blog post, TikTok states that it does not collect “precise” location information.
To justify these practices, TikTok assures that it is “a proven necessity” to carry out its work. The social network also ensures that the storage of the data respects “a series of security controls and robust approval protocols, and through methods recognized within the framework of the RGPD”.
accessible data
Beyond employees, fear of data access by the Chinese government is also a cause for concern. TikTok is a Chinese company whose parent company is ByteDance. As Tech&Co pointed out last July, the latter is a member of the Chinese Federation of Internet Companies.
In the organization’s statutes, each company recalls that “it adheres to the path of Xi Jinping (Chinese president, editor’s note)”, while accepting “the supervision of the Cyberspace Administration of China (the Chinese government body in charge of Internet censorship, editor’s note)”.
Given these practices, the Irish regulator, which has jurisdiction over TikTok throughout the European Union, opened an investigation in September 2021 into “transfers by TikTok of personal data to China.”
Source: BFM TV
