Chinese-owned video-sharing platform TikTok has told users that some of its workers in China have access to data from accounts in the UK and EU.
The social media giant said the “privacy policy” is “based on the need to do our job”.
It has come under scrutiny from authorities around the world, including the UK and US, over fears the data could be passed on to the Chinese government.
Earlier this week, a US official called for the app to be banned in the US.
- TikTok denies it can be used to track US citizens.
- ‘I’ve learned more on TikTok than in school’
TikTok said the policy applies to the “European Economic Area, United Kingdom and Switzerland”.
Elaine Fox, the platform’s head of privacy for Europe, said in a statement Wednesday that a global team helped keep the user experience “consistent, pleasant and secure.”
Although TikTok currently stores European user data in the U.S. and Singapore, “we remote some of our corporate group employees located in Brazil, Canada, China, Israel, Japan, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, South Korea, and the United States.” allow access to TikTok European user data,” Ms Fox said.
“Our efforts are focused on limiting the number of employees with access to European user data, reducing the flow of data out of the region, and storing European user data locally,” he added.
He also said the approach is “subject to a series of robust security controls and approval protocols, and through methods recognized under the GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation)”.
It comes the same week that a top official at the US communications watchdog said TikTok should be banned in the US.
Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Commissioner Brandon Carr said, “I don’t believe there is a path forward for anything other than a ban.”
He added that he believes there is “no world in which you can have enough security on data that you can be confident enough that it’s not going to find its way back into [the Chinese Communist Party’s] hands.” Is.”
TikTok’s owner, ByteDance, has repeatedly denied that it is controlled by the Chinese government.
The app is being scrutinized by authorities in the UK, EU and US.
Under Scrutiny
Britain’s parliament shut down its TikTok account in August after MPs raised concerns about the risk of data being transferred to the Chinese government.
Senior MPs and colleagues had called for the account to be removed until TikTok gave “credible assurances” that no data could be passed on to Beijing.
The app has also been investigated by the Irish Data Protection Commission – its lead regulator in the EU – over two privacy-related issues.
The watchdog is examining TikTok’s processing of children’s personal data, and whether it complied with EU rules on transferring personal data to other countries, such as China.
Meanwhile in 2020, a US national security panel ordered ByteDance to sell its US operations over concerns that customer data could be shared with Chinese authorities.
In June this year, TikTok said it had moved US users’ information to servers run by US software giant Oracle in Austin, Texas.
Last month, TikTok denied a report that a China-based team at ByteDance planned to use the app to track the locations of US citizens.
TikTok said it had never been used to “target” the US government, activists, public figures or journalists.
On Wednesday, Ms. Fox also said the app does not collect accurate location data from users in Europe.
TikTok is the fastest growing social media app in the world and has been downloaded nearly 4 billion times.
According to analytics company Sensor Tower, it has generated more than $6.2bn (£5.4bn) in gross revenue from app spending since its launch in 2017.
