He new policy TikTok is valid from December 2nd. By then, TikTok staff will have access to European user data. This concerns personnel in China, but also in Brazil, Canada, Israel, Japan, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, South Korea, the United Kingdom and the United States. This is stated in new explanation from TikTok.

The data passed includes the user’s viewing behavior and the operation of the algorithms, among other things. This complex system analyzes the user at every step, thereby ensuring an increasingly personalized range of videos.

TikTok was rejected for years

The new terms come after years of rumors that TikTok would pass data on. TikTok initially denied this, but acknowledged this summer that Chinese employees had access to the data of at least American users. A top US woman has refused to tell US senators whether the Chinese government also has access to the data.

Data routing to China is a delicate matter, because Europe does not have a data agreement with China. China is not standing List with countries that, according to the EU, regulate their data protection. There are fears that data from, among other things, young European children will reach the Chinese government through TikTok’s Chinese parent company, ByteDance. It’s not clear what happened to that data.

Chinese tires are sensitive

TikTok has been under the magnifying glass for quite some time because of its Chinese parent company and immense popularity. The application has more than 1 billion users worldwide, in the Netherlands at least 3 million users. That is why Irish privacy watchdog DPC already started an investigation into TikTok last year, and whether user data is being processed properly in accordance with privacy laws GDPR. Ireland is leading the investigation because TikTok’s European data center is located in Ireland.

The US is also investigating TikTok. Under the previous president Trump, there was a near forced sale of TikTok to an American company. In the end, it didn’t get that far, but the current US president Biden also increased the distance to China. His government considers that the west is too dependent on China, especially in the field of technology. New, far-reaching sanctions should change that.