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The Xi Jinping-led government on Friday rejected claims that it requires Chinese companies like TikTok and Shein to collect data from users in the European Union and send them over to Beijing, saying it “has never and will never” gather data illegally.
The Foreign Ministry was responding to a question about six Chinese companies including TikTok, Shein, and Xiaomi, which have been named in a privacy complaint filed by Austrian advocacy group None of Your Business (Nyob) claiming the firms were unlawfully sending European Union user data to China.
Noyb has lodged six complaints across four European countries, calling for the suspension of data transfers to China and pursuing fines that could amount to up to 4 per cent of a company’s global revenue.
The organisation claimed that Alibaba’s e-commerce site AliExpress, retailer Shein, TikTok and phone maker Xiaomi have admitted to sending personal data to China. While retailer Temu and Tencent’s messenger app WeChat transfer data to undisclosed “third countries” likely China.
Under the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) privacy regime, data transfers outside the EU are only allowed if the destination country doesn’t undermine the protection of data.
“Given that China is an authoritarian surveillance state, it is crystal clear that China doesn’t offer the same level of data protection as the EU,” said Kleanthi Sardeli, a data protection lawyer at Noyb. “Transferring Europeans’ personal data is clearly unlawful” and must be terminated immediately.
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