«We are a global platform, TikTok is not present in Chinese, our data is not in China, the management is not in China». This is what the most loved app of the moment says following theaccusation by the European Commission against Tik Tok to steal user data.
Tik Tok defends itself against the decision of the European Commission
A few days ago, the European Commission ordered its employees to cancel the Instagram competitor app. The reason lies in the fact that Tik Tok has been accused of stealing user data.
A similar decision was also taken a few months ago by the United States. The platform has been banned on the phones, tablets and computers of state government employees. This choice comes after the layoff of four employees of ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok. They would illegal access to the personal data of two US journalists.
“The European Commission is an institution and as such has a strong focus on protecting cyber security. It is on this basis that we took this decision», explained the EU commissioner for the internal market Thierry Breton. “We are extremely careful about protecting our data.”
However, TikTok’s Southern Europe institutional relations manager Giacomo Lev Mannheimer clarifies the situation to Ansa. He says: «The investors are not Chinese. We have always publicly stated that the Chinese government has never asked us for access to the data and if it did we would not grant it to them”.
Supporting this point, Manheimer confirms that the data of Tik Tok’s European users is in a data center in the United States. Not only even in a backup data center a Singapore. So they are not kept either in China, or anywhere else.
Furthermore, to make further transparency, the Chinese company has published the list of countries from which Tik Tok employees can access app user data. That way you can be pretty sure who can and who can’t actually see this kind of data.