TikTok has been handed a $600 million (530 million euros) wonderful by European regulators after a four-year investigation discovered the app’s information transfers to China put customers liable to spying, in violation of EU information privateness guidelines.

The inquiry was dealt with by Eire’s Information Safety Fee, the place TikTok has its European. TikTok, which is owned by Chinese language firm ByteDance, plans to appeal.

This doesn’t imply the EU has discovered TikTok complicit in state-sponsored spying, content material manipulation, or espionage; it merely implies that it broke the EU’s comparatively strict cross-country information privateness laws.

Below the Normal Information Safety Regulation (GDPR), transfers of EU residents’ private information outside the EU—and to a number of different developed international locations just like the US, UK, Japan, and Israel—are beholden to strict oversight.

“TikTok’s private information transfers to China infringed the GDPR as a result of TikTok didn’t confirm, assure and display that the private information of EEA customers, remotely accessed by employees in China, was afforded a stage of safety primarily equal to that assured throughout the EU,” stated DPC Deputy Commissioner Graham Doyle.

“On account of TikTok’s failure to undertake the required assessments, TikTok didn’t deal with potential entry by Chinese language authorities to European Financial Space (EEA) private information beneath Chinese language anti-terrorism, counter-espionage and different legal guidelines recognized by TikTok as materially diverging from EU requirements.”

Within the US, TikTok faces a late June ban if it doesn’t sell off its US operations, largely due to US considerations that TikTok will give US information to the Chinese language.

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About Will McCurdy

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I’m a reporter protecting weekend information. Earlier than becoming a member of PCMag in 2024, I picked up bylines in BBC Information, The Guardian, The Occasions of London, The Each day Beast, Vice, Slate, Quick Firm, The Night Normal, The i, TechRadar, and Decrypt Media.

I’ve been a PC gamer because you needed to set up video games from a number of CD-ROMs by hand. As a reporter, I’m passionate in regards to the intersection of tech and human lives. I’ve coated every little thing from crypto scandals to the artwork world, in addition to conspiracy theories, UK politics, and Russia and international affairs.

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