The Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC) has announced that it has opened an inquiry into TikTok’s transfers of European users’ personal data to servers located in China.
The investigation follows on from the DPC’s decision of 30 April 2025, which also looked at the company’s transfers of personal data to China under a separate inquiry.
The DPC said that during that previous inquiry, TikTok maintained that transfers of European users’ personal data to China took place by way of remote access only and that this user data was not stored on servers located within China.
However, in April 2025, TikTok informed the DPC of an issue that it had discovered in February 2025, that limited European user data had in fact been stored on servers in China, contrary to TikTok’s evidence to the previous inquiry.
In a statement issued at the time of the conclusion of its previous inquiry, the DPC stated that it was taking those developments “very seriously” and was “considering what further regulatory action may be warranted, in consultation with our peer EU Data Protection Authorities”.
As a result of that consideration, the DPC has now decided to open this new inquiry into TikTok.
The decision was taken by the Commissioners for Data Protection, Dr Des Hogan and Dale Sunderland, and was notified to TikTok earlier this week.
The purpose of the inquiry is to determine whether TikTok has complied with its relevant obligations under the GDPR in the context of the transfers now at issue, including the lawfulness of the transfers.
TikTok said its teams proactively discovered the issue through comprehensive monitoring implemented under “Project Clover”, TikTok’s plan to keep European user data secure.
“We promptly deleted this minimal amount of data from the servers and informed the DPC,” a spokesperson said.
“Our proactive report to the DPC underscores our commitment to transparency and data security,” they added.
Following the previous investigation, the DPC fined TikTok €530 million.
The video-sharing platform said it disagreed with the decision and that it planned to appeal it in full.
