TikTok again under the lens of Privacy guarantor Italian for i potential ties of its Chinese parent company, ByteDance, with the Beijing government. The Authority, as stated in a note, asked TikTok about it about the statements by a former executive of the ByteDance companyreported by the press, relating to a alleged access to personal data of users by the Communist Party of China.
TikTok and the alleged links with Beijing
The alleged link between Chinese companies and the Beijing government, a suspicion that has also affected other companies, such as Huawei – the most debated case so far by governments and international media – is always been denied by China’s companies.
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But, says the Italian authority that protects the privacyconsidering that the news refers to an alleged illicit communication of personal data by TikTok to the Communist Party of China (“activity firmly excluded by the company also on the occasion of recent institutional meetings on the subject”), the Guarantor invited the social network to provide their comments on what has been reported and on the possible involvement of TikTok Technology in the transmission of data of users, including Italian and European ones, to the Chinese government authorities.
The reply to the Authority must be received within 15 days from receipt of the request.
TikTok tries to please Europe
The Italian Guarantor is particularly attentive on data protection issues. In addition to stopping the ChatGpt platform, it was the first organization in Europe to ban chatbot specialist Ai Replika, to impose fines on facial recognition software maker Clearview Ai ea limitare TikTok.
TikTok has long been observed special even by European regulators, who have it prohibited for use by employees of EU institutional bodies. Also for this reason, the Chinese company has launched the clover project, with which it intends to create aautonomous European enclave for user data of the United Kingdom and the European Economic Area, plus Iceland, Liechtenstein and Norway (See).
The project, which is worth 1.2 billion euros, envisages a series of innovative measures that will be implemented throughout the current year and until 2024 in order to strengthen the already existing data protection and thus respond to the concerns of the EU and the US, as communicated by TikTok itself.
The “ban” in the US
Already during the Trump administration, the United States has put TikTok’s activities in America under close scrutiny and its corporate management under control. Last March, the‘TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew, testified for the first time before the United States Congress, in an effort to avoid a federal ban on the platform or a forced sale, which Beijing intends to avoid at all costs.
The suspicions of US politicians about Chinese society do not subside, so much so that in recent days, the state of Montana has become the first in the US federation to ban the use of the app short videos. This was announced on Twitter by the governor Greg Gianforte, who defines TikTok “an app linked to foreign opponents”; hence the decision to ban it to protect citizens’ private data and personal information “from the Chinese Communist Party”.
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