Tech Desk 
May 04, 2025
In a surprising turn of events involving the non-consensual transmission of user data, TikTok has once again been fined €530 million by Ireland’s Data Protection Commission (DPC) for failing to properly safeguard European user data and providing misleading information during a formal investigation.
The penalty has been imposed on the Chinese short-video platform following an inquiry into how it handled cross-border transfers of data from the European Economic Area (EEA) to China.
The data protection body found that TikTok did not exercise adequate protections against Chinese authorities' access to the platform's European user data, according to Reuters.
TikTok has also been accused of failing to explain how it abided by EU data laws, especially in the context of Chinese surveillance legislation, according to the DPC.
While the Chinese social media platform initially claimed that no EEA data was stored in China, it later admitted that a limited amount of data was.
Raising serious concerns under the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the DPC also discovered that TikTok employees based in China had remote access to European user data.
Regarding whether the data access was requested, the ByteDance-owned platform stressed that it had never been asked by China to do so, while denying having shared any data with the Chinese authorities.
