The government of China today denied it was involved in any illegal storage of personal data on servers located on Chinese soil, after EU has launched an investigation into TikTok.

“The Chinese government attaches great importance to the confidentiality and security of the data and protects it as stipulated by law,” said Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Mao Ning.

According to Ning, Beijing “has never and will never require companies or individuals to illegally collect or store personal data.”

“We hope that the European side will respect the market economy and fair competition and provide a fair, equitable and non-discriminatory business environment for companies from all countries,” Mao added.

The Irish Data Protection Authority (DPC), acting on behalf of the EU, launched an investigation against TikTok yesterday (Thursday) regarding the storage of personal data of European users of the platform on Chinese servers, which may be illegal.

TikTok, the platform with 1.5 billion users, is owned by Chinese company ByteDance and TikTok’s European headquarters, like that of most tech giants, is in Ireland.

As with most of the world’s leading companies, TikTokyo is based in Ireland.
For years, the social network has been a target of Western countries concerned about its ties to Beijing and the potential use of its users’ data for espionage and propaganda purposes.

The DPC fined TikTok €530 million in early May for failing to ensure adequate protection of Europeans’ personal data, which can be accessed remotely from China but is stored outside the country.

During this investigation TikTok admitted that some European data was no longer accessible, but had been stored in China (and had since been deleted).

The company cited a technical problem and assured that it had “never received a request” from the Chinese authorities and “had never provided them with European user data”.

However, according to DPC, it was unable to offer any guarantees to prevent possible access by Chinese authorities to this data through anti-terrorism and counter-espionage legislation.

The aim of the new investigation “is to determine whether the social media outlet has complied with its relevant obligations under the GDPR (European General Data Protection Regulation) in the context of such transfers,” the DPC explained on Thursday.

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