This is the first time that the platform has declared it publicly. The data is encrypted and is only accessible to a small number of employees, according to the social network.
Le Monde
In a blog post published Wednesday November 2, Tiktok A publicly recognized for the first time that data from its European users can be consulted,” according to the needs of the service “, by employees in several countries, including China.
The data of people in Europe using the application, very popular with adolescents worldwide, can be consulted by “certain employees of our group located in Brazil, Canada, China, Israel, Japan, In Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, South Korea and the United States, “explains Elaine Fox, head of privacy for Tiktok in Europe.
Some of these countries, including the Philippines, correspond to places where Tiktok, like other social networks, have content moderation centers.
Legal obligations
“Our efforts are focused on limiting the number of employees with access to data from our European users, and on the limitation of data flowers outside Europe as well as on the storage in Europe of these data of these users “, writes m me fox.
The degree of access by Bytedance, the parent company of Tiktok, provides to the Chinese authorities, is the subject of intense discussions and speculation, especially in the United States. In June, internal exchanges to the company, revealed by the American site Buzzfeed, thus suggested that engineers of the application had had access from China to the information of American users, at least between September 2021 and January 2022.
Like any social network, Bytedance is subject to the legal constraints of the country where its headquarters is located, suggesting that Chinese security and intelligence services can access large amounts of information on European or American users ‘Application.