17:28 - 2.05.2025

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May 2, Fineko/abc.az. TikTok has to pay €530 million in penalties because it sent the personal data of Europeans to China illegally and wasn’t transparent enough with users, Ireland’s powerful privacy regulator said Friday.

The Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC) said TikTok breached the EU’s flagship data protection rules when it sent European user data to China because it couldn’t guarantee that the data was protected under China’s surveillance laws.

Taking a stance on data transfers to China for the first time, the regulator said TikTok failed to adequately assess the implications of Chinese surveillance laws on Europeans’ data.

Those laws — which give the Chinese government sweeping powers to order companies to hand over data — “materially diverge from EU standards,” TikTok acknowledged during the inquiry.

The regulator also said TikTok breached transparency rules between 2020 and 2022 because it didn’t tell users that personal data was being transferred to China. It noted that TikTok updated its privacy policy in 2022 and is now “compliant.”

The company has been fined €485 million for its data transfers to China and €45 million for the lack of transparency in its privacy policy.