On 25 March 2025, the Irish Data Protection Commission (‘DPC’) confirmed that it received no objections to its draft decision on how TikTok Technology Limited (‘TikTok’) transfers personal data to China.
The DPC, in its role as the lead supervisory authority for the Irish-headquartered TikTok, opened two ex officio inquiries into the TikTok’s GDPR compliance in September 2021 in relation to:
- the processing of children’s personal data; and
- the data the platform sends to China.
The first of these resulted in the DPC imposing on TikTok a EUR 345 million fine in 2023 for insufficient processes for user age verification when creating accounts as well as the Company’s ‘public-by-default’ children’s setting whereby, when users of public accounts posted a video, the video was publicly published to ‘Everyone’ by default.
Following the second inquiry, the DPC submitted its draft decision regarding TikTok’s international data transfers to China on 21 February 2025 for the attention of other concerned supervisory authorities across the European Economic Area to provide any objections under Article 60 GDPR. The DPC received no objections. The confirmation of no objections indicates alignment from the other regulators on the DPC’s proposed findings. As such, the draft decision will become final, with a formal decision expected to be announced in the coming weeks.
The announcement reiterates the consensus amongst European supervisory authorities that non-compliant international data transfers – to territories such as China – are a top priority; particularly following recent decisions and investigations opened by the Italian, Dutch and German regulators over the last month in relation to DeepSeek.
We await the text of the DPC’s final decision. Once released, we will provide an update on the DPC’s findings and any resulting enforcement actions.
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