Tiktok was fined of 530 million euros ($ 600 million) on Friday for violating a privacy law of the European Union data after the regulators discovered that the company had improperly committed the personal data of users in China.
The Irish Data Protection Commission, which announced the sanction, said that Tiktok was unable to properly protect the data of its users in Europe, including some available for staff in China, in violation of the privacy law of the European Union data, the General Data Protection Regulation.
The fine is one of the largest taxes by law and adds to the challenges faced by the Chinese owner of Tiktok, Bytedance, between an American effort to force the sale of the platform to a non -Chinese company or be banned in the United States. The Irish authorities said that Tiktok would be ordered to suspend data transfers in China within six months if not met certain requirements.
European regulators said that Tiktok's weak guarantees put information on users in the block of 27 nations at risk. The Irish authorities have said that the Chinese government, based on its anti-terrorism and anti-exhibition laws, could have gained access to the data of these users.
Tiktok, who has about 175 million users throughout Europe, declared in a declaration that complies with the laws of the European Union. The company “has never received a request for European users' data from the Chinese authorities and has never provided them European data for users,” said Tiktok.
Tiktok said that he planned to appeal to the decision, a move that could create a judicial battle of years with the Irish government, which is the main regulator of Tiktok in Europe. The European headquarters of Tiktok is in Ireland and its government is accused of enforcing the general data protection regulation.
Tiktok said that the Irish data protection commission did not take into account an initiative from 2023 to spend 12 billion euros to fence user data within the European Union. The project included the construction of a data center in Finland.
“This sentence risks establishing a precedent with large -scale consequences for companies and entire industries throughout Europe operating on a global scale,” said Tiktok in a note.
On Friday, the Irish regulators said that last month, Tiktok said he discovered that a “limited” amount of user data had been archived on the servers inside China after he had repeatedly denied it.
European users were not “offered a level of protection essentially equivalent to that guaranteed within the EU,” said Graham Doyle, deputy commissioner of the Irish data protection commission.