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Tiktok has been awarded a fine of € 530m to send users’ data to China, in a decision that the social media group said there will be negative consequences for “any company in Europe with global operations”.
The Ireland Data Protection Commission issued the financial sentence on Friday, saying that TIKTOK had violated EU data protection rules for transferring personal information to China, as well as a failure of other transparency requirements.
The Irish supervisor, responsible for the issue, as the European Base of Tiktok is in Dublin, has ordered that the viral video group bring its processing into compliance within six months.
Tiktok, whose parent company Bytedance is located in Beijing, said he disagreed with the decision and pledged to appeal.
“The DPC itself has recorded in its report what TIKTOK has repeatedly said: it has never received a request for European users from the Chinese authorities, and has never given them European users’ data,” the company said in a statement.
“This decision has implications not only for Tiktok, but for every company in Europe that operates globally. We disagree with this decision and we aim to fully appeal,” he added.
The sentence is the third highest issued by the Irish DPC, which previously fined Facebook Meta 1.2bn € and Amazon € 746 million. In 2023, it also fined Tiktok € 345 million in 2023 on how it processed personal data of children and adolescents.
The DPC investigation included Tiktok operations between September 2021 and May 2023. He said TIKTOK eventually admitted that the “restricted” European users’ data were stored in the server in China, as they initially denied this was the case. Tiktok has said that these data have been deleted since then.
Notifying the fine, DPC Commissioner Graham Doyle said: “TIKTOK did not address the possible approach by the Chinese authorities to (European users) data according to Chinese anti-terrorism, counter-sustaining and other laws identified by Tiktok as materially removed from EU standards.
Tiktok said the DPC ruling focused solely on a period of choice and did not reflect the defense measures placed under his 12BN security initiative called the Clover project that had “some of the stricter data protection everywhere”.
Tiktok is also under fire at the US, where Congress last year adopted the legislation required by bydance to divert the app or to face a nationwide detention.
President Donald Trump, who has given the company a comeback, suggested that he could cut Chinese goods tariffs if Beijing allowed Bytedance to sell the extremely popular video sharing app for American investors.
