BEIJING: Beijing on Friday (Jul 11) denied asking corporations to “illegally” acquire and retailer customers’ private info, after an Irish regulator serving to the European Union regulate information privateness started investigating Chinese language social media large TikTok.
“The Chinese language authorities attaches nice significance to and protects information privateness and safety in accordance with the regulation,” international ministry spokeswoman Mao Ning mentioned.
Beijing “has by no means and can by no means require corporations or people to illegally acquire or retailer information”, Mao mentioned.
“We hope that the European aspect will respect the market economic system and truthful competitors, and supply a good, simply and non-discriminatory enterprise surroundings for corporations from all international locations,” she advised an everyday information convention.
The social media large has been within the crosshairs of Western governments for years over fears that private information may very well be utilized by China for espionage or propaganda functions.
Nevertheless, TikTok has insisted that it has by no means acquired any requests from Chinese language authorities for European customers’ information.
TikTok was fined €530 million (US$620 million) in Might by the Knowledge Safety Fee over sending private information to China, though the Chinese language social media large had insisted this information was solely accessed remotely.
TikTok, which has 1.5 billion customers worldwide, is a division of Chinese language tech large ByteDance.
