TikTok Fined €530 Million Over Chinese Access to EU Data

The Irish Data Protection Commission has fined TikTok €530 million for GDPR violations after finding the company could not prove EEA user data was protected from remote access by staff in China; TikTok later acknowledged some EEA data had been erroneously stored in China, which it says has been deleted and plans to appeal. The report frames this as a data sovereignty and compliance issue, highlights TikTok’s Project Clover and third-party oversight claims, and discusses broader industry trends toward localization and stricter cross-border data controls.