TikTok says in its new privacy policy that employees can view user data in several countries, including China. This immediately raises fears that the government could also misuse the data there.
In the new policy, which goes into effect on December 2, TikTok says that data belonging to users in the EU, the United Kingdom and Switzerland, in some cases, employees of the parent company, can access.
These are employees in Brazil, Canada, China, Israel, Japan, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, South Korea and the US. Although access from China is compassionate because, once in China, that data can, in principle, also be viewed or used by the Chinese government. Today, data from European TikTokkers is stored in Singapore.
Elaine Fox, head of privacy for Europe at TikTok, says in a blog post that the privacy policy aims to give as few people as possible unnecessarily access to user data. But it is also necessary that several people worldwide have access to user data to make the platform a consistent and secure environment.
The situation is very twofold. First, TikTok owner Bytedance formally says it is not under the control of the Chinese government. But in the past, China has already shown that it can intervene with large technology companies if it feels the need to do so. This is often done quite subtly. In the West, for example, it is generally accepted that Jack Ma hardly appears in public anymore under pressure from the Chinese government and that he distanced himself from several activities. This happened after he criticized the Chinese banking system.
In addition, there has been pressure from the US on privacy for some time. There, all data from American users have recently been handled by Oracle. But recently, there was a call from politicians to ban TikTok in the country entirely.