TikTok CEO reassures EU on privacy, child safety rules

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TikTok Chief Executive Officer Shou Zi Chew arrived in Brussels on Tuesday, seeking to reassure the European Union that his app, which has been making a run for the top social media platform for years now, would respect the bloc's tech rules and commitments to privacy and child safety.

The Chinese ByteDance social media app has been fighting tooth and nail for years in the US to assure Washington that users' personal data was not in jeopardy.

In December, following concerns from the FBI director and cybersecurity experts that China may exploit the social media platform to allegedly spy on US citizens, Senator Marco Rubio, the top Republican on the Senate Intelligence Committee, and a bipartisan pair of congressmen in the House, proposed a bill that would prohibit TikTok in the United States.

TikTok has been under more pressure lately after admitting last month that some of its employees had improperly accessed the user data of two journalists to try to identify the source of information leaks to the media.

However, TikTok has not been receiving as much scrutiny as its American counterparts due to the major violations the latter are committing in contrast. This might not be the case for long as the 27-nation bloc seeks to tighten its hold on social media and police it further while curbing Big Tech's power.

Chew's series of meetings in Brussels began with EU antitrust chief Margrethe Vestager, who said: "The objective of the meeting with TikTok was to review how the company is preparing for complying with its obligations under the European Commission's regulation, namely the Digital Services Act (DSA) and possibly under the Digital Markets Act (DMA)."

"At the meeting, the parties also discussed GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) and matters of privacy and data transfer obligations with a reference to the recent press reporting on aggressive data harvesting and surveillance in the US," the EU statement added.

Meanwhile, Values and Transparency Commissioner Vera Jourova underlined her concerns to Chew, which include the protection of Europeans' personal data, child safety, and the spread of "disinformation" on the platform as well as the transparency of political advertising.

"I count on TikTok to fully execute its commitments to go the extra mile in respecting EU law and regaining the trust of European regulators," she said in a statement after the meeting.

Moreover, EU justice chief Didier Reynders told Chew that TikTok could do more to remove hate content on its platform.

Tiktok said it was committed to complying with EU rules in a transparent way. "It's a top priority for us to be ready for this," its vice-president for public policy, Europe, Theo Bertram, said in a tweet.

Our conversations today focused on our commitment to compliance with regulations that will shape Europeans' experience of platforms like ours - and set important new standards in transparency along the way. It's a top priority for us to be ready for this.

— Theo Bertram (@theobertram) January 10, 2023

In its latest attempt to assure the US government and convince it to stay operational under its owner ByteDance, TikTok offered to subject an increased amount of its business to foreign auditing.

A report published by Reuters in late December said that the popular app has been "seeking to assure US government departments and agencies for the last three years" that China's Communist Party (CCP) can't access the "personal data of U.S. citizens" nor influence its content.

TikTok has come under severe attack from within the Democratic and Republican parties, while the US administration is considering a proposal regarding the continuation of the app's operation in the United States.