Tiktok was fined € 530 million ($ 600 million) on Friday to violate the European Union’s privacy law, after regulatory authorities found that the company had improperly transferred users’ personal data to China.
The Irish Data Protection Committee, which announced the penalty, said that Tiktok failed to sufficiently protect the details of its users in Europe, including some available to China’s staff, in violation of the European Union Privacy Act, the General Regulation on Data Protection.
The fine is one of the largest law enforced and adds to the challenges facing the Chinese owner of Tiktok, Byteance, amid an American effort to force the platform to sell to a non -Chinese company or to be banned in the United States. The Irish authorities said Tiktok would be ordered to suspend data transfers to China within six months if he did not meet certain requirements.
European regulators said Tiktok’s weak safeguards put in information on the risk of users throughout the 27-Nation block. The Irish authorities have said that the Chinese government, in accordance with anti -anti -anti -anti -protection laws, could have gained access to the data of these users.
Tiktok, which has about 175 million users across Europe, said in a statement that it complies with the laws of the European Union. The company “has never received a request for European user data from the Chinese authorities and has never provided European user data to them,” Tiktok said.
Tiktok said he was planning to appeal to the decision, a move that could create a year of legal battle between it and the Irish government, which is Tiktok’s main regulator in Europe. Tiktok’s European headquarters is in Ireland and its government is accused of enforcing the General Data Protection Regulation.
Tiktok said the Ireland Data Protection Committee did not represent the 2023 initiative to spend 12 billion euros to clog us users within the European Union. The project included the construction of a data center in Finland.
“This decision is in danger of putting a previous one with extensive consequences for companies and entire industries across Europe that operate on a global scale,” Tiktok said in a statement.
On Friday, Irish regulators said last month, Tiktok said he had discovered a “limited” amount of user data stored on servers inside China after repeatedly refused to do so.
European users had not “provided a level of protection essentially equivalent to what guarantees the EU,” said Graham Doyle, Deputy Commissioner of the Irish Data Protection Committee.
