At TikTok they have been working on it for a while new user agreement and privacy statement. They’ll go into effect today, but it won’t go without a fight: lawyers say the agreement violates European privacy rules.

Not all countries

The new agreement states that non-European employees will also be able to view data from Europeans. Concretely, this concerns employees who can access data from eleven countries. To make this possible, TikTok uses standard contracts that have been approved by the European Commission. Only: it’s not good enough for all countries.

No problem for Canada, UK, Israel, Japan and South Korea. Things need to be better secured for Brazil, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, US and China. A European judge ruled that TikTok must guarantee better privacy than a standard contract provides. However, the Chinese company did not address this in its new privacy statement.

TikTok is also silent about which data foreign employees will see. The company insists that data can only be accessed in “restricted and secure” contexts and that an authorization process must be completed to access data.

Dutch NOS asked several attorneys to study the new statement. They referred the document to the trash. After all, TikTok can only share your data with its employees if they comply with all European privacy provisions. Nobody seems sure that will happen.

TikTok and the government

Especially the Chinese roots of TikTok and parent company ByteDance continue to work hard on the app. While ByteDance continues to deny any ties to the Chinese government, the relationship between the government and the company is causing concern in Europe. While TikTok believes it never shares data with the Chinese government, doing so could force the company to do so. In the context of national security, for example, all types of data can be requested. Though it’s possible that such a thing isn’t necessary: ​​many TikTok employees have worked for the Chinese government or have second jobs there. So the ties between government and business do not appear to be as loose as ByteDance claims.