Tiktok received a fine of 530 million euros ($ 600 million) on Friday for violating a Device Privacy Act of the European Union after regulators discovered that the company had incorrectly transferred the personal data of users to China.
The Irish Data Protection Commission, which announced the fine, said that Tiktok did not adequately protect the data from its users in Europe, including some that were available for staff in China, contrary to the Data Protection Regulations for the European Union.
The fine is one of the largest imposed under the law and contributes to the challenges with which the Chinese owner of Tiktok, Bytedance, is amid an American attempt to force the sale of the platform to a non-Chinese company or to be banned in the United States. The Irish authorities said Tiktok would be ordered to suspend data transfer to China within six months if it did not meet certain requirements.
European supervisors said that the weak guarantees of Tiktok endanger information about users in the 27-country block. The Irish authorities said that the Chinese government could have gained access to the data of those users under its anti-terrorism and anti-espionage laws.
Tiktok, which has around 175 million users throughout Europe, said in a statement that it meets the European Union laws. The company has “never received a request for European user data from the Chinese authorities and has never provided European user data to them,” said Tiktok.
Tiktok said it was planning to appeal against the decision, a movement that could set up judicial battle for a year with the Irish government, which is the most important regulator of Tiktok in Europe. The European headquarters of Tiktok is located in Ireland and its government is responsible for maintaining the General Data Protection Regulation.
Tiktok said that the Irish Data Protection Commission did not take into account an initiative of 2023 to spend € 12 billion on Hek in data from users in the European Union. The project included the construction of a data center in Finland.
“These prevailing risks are in danger of forming a precedent with far -reaching consequences for companies and entire industries throughout Europe that work on a global scale,” Tiktok said in a statement.
On Friday, Irish regulators said Tiktok said last month that it had discovered that a “limited” amount of users were stored on servers in China after it had repeatedly denied.
European users were not offered a level of protection that are essentially equivalent to that guaranteed within the EU, “said Graham Doyle, deputy commissioner of the Irish Data Protection Commission, in a statement.
