Ireland is unhappy
Popular social media platform TikTok has been fined €530 million by the Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC) for breaching EU data protection rules. According to GSMArena, an investigation launched in 2021 found that TikTok, which is owned by China’s ByteDance, illegally transferred European users’ data to China “without ensuring that it was protected from access by Chinese authorities.”
This breaches the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which requires EU citizens’ data transferred outside the region to have an equivalent level of protection. The DPC found that TikTok had failed to disclose that it was storing data in China until April 2025, despite previously denying it was. The company has been given six months to bring its processes into compliance with the GDPR or face a suspension of data transfers to China.
TikTok plans to appeal the decision, arguing that it uses standard protection mechanisms like other companies and citing Project Clover, which includes European data centers.Source: GSMArena
