Eire’s Information Safety Fee (DPC) on Friday fined widespread video-sharing platform TikTok €530 million ($601 million) for infringing knowledge safety rules within the area by transferring European customers’ knowledge to China.
“TikTok infringed the GDPR concerning its transfers of EEA [European Economic Area] Consumer Information to China and its transparency necessities,” the DPC stated in a press release. “The choice contains administrative fines totaling €530 million and an order requiring TikTok to deliver its processing into compliance inside 6 months.”
The order, as well as, requires the corporate to droop knowledge transfers to China throughout the time interval.
The penalty is the results of an investigation that was launched in September 2021 that probed the corporate’s switch of non-public knowledge to China and its compliance with stringent knowledge safety legal guidelines concerning knowledge transfers to 3rd nations.
Commenting on the choice, DPC Deputy Commissioner Graham Doyle stated TikTok’s private knowledge transfers to China went towards Article 46(1) of the Basic Information Safety Regulation (GDPR) as a result of it did not confirm and assure that the non-public knowledge of EEA customers was given equal privateness protections to that afforded throughout the bloc.
Doyle additional added that TikTok didn’t handle issues arising from potential entry by Chinese language authorities below anti-terrorism and counter-espionage legal guidelines within the nation and which “materially” diverged from European Union requirements.
The DPC additionally faulted TikTok for offering misguided data through the inquiry to the impact that it didn’t retailer EEA customers’ knowledge in Chinese language servers, solely to confide in the watchdog final month that it recognized a problem in its programs in February 2025, on account of which restricted EEA knowledge had certainly been saved on servers in China.
“While TikTok has knowledgeable the DPC that the info has now been deleted, we’re contemplating what additional regulatory motion could also be warranted, in session with our peer EU Information Safety Authorities,” Doyle stated.
Christine Grahn, TikTok’s head of public coverage and authorities relations for Europe, stated the choice did not have in mind Mission Clover, a knowledge safety initiative aimed toward defending European consumer knowledge, and that the ruling doesn’t mirror the present safeguards put in place.
“The DPC itself recorded in its report what TikTok has persistently stated: it has by no means acquired a request for European consumer knowledge from the Chinese language authorities, and has by no means supplied European consumer knowledge to them,” Grahn stated.
That is the second tremendous levied by the DPC towards the ByteDance-owned firm. In September 2023, TikTok was handed a €345 million (then about $368 million) tremendous for violating GDPR legal guidelines in relation to its dealing with of kids’s knowledge.
