TikTok, the Chinese-owned video sharing platform, faces two inquiries from a data regulator in the European Union (EU) over its processing of children’s information and transferring of user data to China.
The second inquiry will examine whether TikTok transfers EU user data to China, where its parent company ByteDance is located.
“TikTok tells us that EU data is transferred to the United States and not to China. However, we have understood that there is [a] possibility that maintenance and AI engineers in China may be accessing data,” the report stated, citing Dixon’s speech at an online event.
EU’s strict General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) privacy law, allows only one regulator to oversee multinational companies’ operations in the bloc.
“From that point on, the DPA was only authorized to assess TikTok’s privacy statement because the violation itself had already ended,” Monique Verdier, deputy chair of the Netherlands data watchdog, said in the statement.
“It is now up to Ireland’s Data Protection Commission to finish our investigation and issue a final ruling on the other possible violations of privacy investigated by the DPA.”
Under GDPR, companies can be fined up to 4 percent of their global revenue. ByteDance reported $34.3 billion in earnings in 2020, up 111 percent year-on-year.
Ireland’s privacy watchdog levied a record fine of $265 million to WhatsApp for breaching GDPR earlier this month. The regulator said it had received complaints about how the app processes personal data, including users and those who don’t use WhatsApp, since the enactment of GDPR in 2018.
“This includes information provided to data subjects about the processing of information between WhatsApp and other Facebook companies,” according to the statement.
TikTok has been under scrutiny in the United States because of security concerns about its Chinese owner.