by TIKTOK is faced with a new data protection examination by the European Union for user data sent to China, the supervisory authorities said.
The Data Protection Commission (DPC) opened the investigation as a follow-up of an earlier examination, which ended at the beginning of this year with a fine of 530 million euros (456 million GBP) after the video sharing app had exposed the risk of the outlet by giving it a remote access to its data from China.
The Irish national guard dog serves in the EU of 27 nations as Tikok’s main data protection regulator, since the company’s European headquarters in Dublin is based.
During an earlier investigation, Tikok initially informed the regulatory authority that it had not saved any European user data in China and that the data was only accessed from a distance by the employees in China.
However, it was later returned and said that some data had actually been saved on Chinese servers.
At the time, the guard dog replied with the view that it would consider further regulatory measures.
“As a result of this consideration, the DPC has now decided to open this new investigation in Tiktok,” said the watchdog.
“The purpose of the investigation is to determine whether Tikkok has complied with its relevant obligations within the framework of the GDPR in connection with the transfers now in question, including the legality of the transmissions,” said the regulatory authority, with reference to the strict data protection regulations of the European Union, known as a general data protection regulation (GDPR).
Tikok, which belongs to China’s bytedance, was examined in Europe under the examination of personal user information, taking into account Western civil servants, that it is a security risk.
Tikok noted that it was the one who notified the data protection commission after initiating a data localization project entitled Project Clover, in which three data centers were built in Europe to facilitate security concerns.
“Our teams proactively discovered this problem through the comprehensive surveillance that TikTok implemented under Project Clover,” said the company in an explanation.
“We immediately deleted this minimal amount of data from the servers and informed the DPC. Our proactive report to the DPC underlines our commitment to transparency and data security.”
According to the GDPR, European user data can only be transferred outside the block if there are protective measures to ensure the same level of protection.
Only 15 countries or areas are the same data protection standards as the EU, but China is not one of them.
