The fine specifically comes from the Irish Data Protection Commission, which found in an investigation that TikTok did not protect European user data and that the Chinese government could have potentially accessed the data from the 27 countries in the European Union. (Per the Times, Ireland has emerged as the main regulator of TikTok in the EU.) The commission shared that after repeatedly denying that data was stored in China, TikTok admitted that they had found a “limited” amount on servers inside China.
“This ruling risks setting a precedent with far-reaching consequences for companies and entire industries across Europe that operate on a global scale,” TikTok said in a statement to the Times, adding that it “never received a request for European user data from the Chinese authorities, and has never provided European user data to them.” The company said it planned to appeal the decision, which could potentially set up another years-long legal battle.
In the States, TikTok is currently in yet another grace period after it was banned for a few hours in January. In early April, President Trump granted the app another 75-day extension to find a new owner, which Trump presented as part of his mission to “save TikTok.” (The push to ban it started with him in the first place, back in his first term in 2020.) It’s unclear as of this writing what will happen with that, but the app is poised for another ban in June if a solution can’t be found.