The Chinese government denied on Friday any involvement in the illegal storage of personal data on servers within its territory, in response to the launch of an investigation into TikTok by the European Union.
"The Chinese government attaches great importance to data confidentiality and security and protects it in accordance with the law," said a spokesperson for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Beijing "has never demanded and will never demand that companies or private individuals collect and store data illegally," she added.
On Thursday, it was announced that the Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC) launched an investigation on behalf of the European Union into the storage of personal data from European TikTok users on Chinese servers.
In early May, the DPC fined TikTok €530 million for failing to adequately protect the personal data of Europeans. This data is accessible remotely from China but stored elsewhere.
However, during the investigation, TikTok announced that certain European data, although not accessible, was indeed stored in China. The platform spoke of "a technical issue" that was discovered thanks to "proactive monitoring."
The DPC now wants to check "whether the social network has complied with all its obligations under the GDPR."
European personal data may only be transferred to countries that the EU considers sufficiently secure in terms of privacy protection, such as Japan or the United Kingdom. If this recognition is not granted, the company in question must prove that the level of privacy protection in that country is equivalent to that in the EU, which TikTok was unable to do.
