Data from European TikTok users travels far beyond the continent. In a new update, the Chinese-based platform allows its non-European employees to have access to the data of users from other countries, while it has assured to respect the rules of data protection in the past .
“We allow certain employees of our group located in Brazil, Canada, China, Israel, Japan, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, South Korea and the United States to access, remotely, the data users” of Tiktok, including Europeans, explained Elaine Fox, the platform’s privacy manager in Europe, in a blog post.
However, it ensures that these steps are done in accordance with “a proven need to perform their work, a series of robust security controls and approval protocols, and through methods recognized under the GDPR”.
An update scheduled for December
In principle, this data can be used to carry out checks on the functionalities of the application, such as, for example, on its recommendation algorithm, or in order to detect accounts responsible for automated harassment, specifies the Guardian. This change in usage policy is applied in the United Kingdom, member countries of the European Economic Area (including France, therefore), as well as Switzerland.
Since 2018, in the European Union, the General Data Protection Regulation has governed the management of personal data of Internet users. It affects the use of a social network or an online service, and requires platforms operating in Europe to store the data of their users on the continent.
In this context, the rise of the TikTok application, based in China, worries the European and American authorities. In question, in particular, the powerful recommendation algorithm of the video application, capable of identifying many aspects of the personality of its users.
The Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC), in charge of supervising the respect of the rights of Internet users in the EU, also launched an investigation in September into suspicions of “transfers by TikTok of personal data to China “.
TikTok “data collection champion”
Several other issues have been detected in the application. TikTok’s search engine, in particular, has already been identified by Proton Secure Messaging as a tool used to track the activity of certain users.
“If Gafam were already considered world champions in data collection, TikTok took it to the next level” tackles Andy Yen, CEO of Proton, the publisher of encrypted messaging Protonmail and activist for the protection of privacy online, with the Parisian.
If this “leak” of data to China is worrying, it is also because Westerners, in particular the United States, fear that the Chinese government will use this data to increase its surveillance. In July, Shou Zi Chew, the CEO of TikTok, and chief financial officer of Byte Dance, the owner of the application, had promised American senators that the data accessed by its Chinese employees was “not sensitive” and not were not shared with the Beijing regime.