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Privacy NGO Noyb targets three Chinese apps with data access complaints

Privacy NGO Noyb targets three Chinese apps with data access complaints

Euractiv17-07-2025
Noyb, the not-for-profit privacy rights organisation that's had a string of major successes against against US Big Tech's privacy-hostile practice in recent years, has filed a trio of data protection complaints against three different Chinese apps.
The three General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) complaints were filed on 17 July against Chinese-owned video-based social media TikTok, ecommerce marketplace AliExpress and messaging app WeChat, accusing them of failing to fulfil data access requests.
The GDPR provides Europeans with a suite of personal data rights, including the right to request a copy of data held about them. However Noyb found that TikTok, AliExpress and WeChat either failed to respond entirely to such a request or sent partial or inaccessible information.
"Chinese apps are even worse than US providers," Noyb wrote in a press release about the action, criticising the companies for failing to implement automated tools that would allow European users to download their personal data directly.
According to Noyb, TikTok responded incompletely to a data access request, AliExpress sent a broken file, and WeChat ignored the request entirely.
The complaints against TikTok, AliExpress and WeChat have been filed in Greece, Belgium and the Netherlands respectively.
Back in 2019, the privacy rights NGO filed similar data access complaints against eight European and US tech firms – some of which resulted in enforcement action including fines.
On paper, a GDPR fine can reach up to 4% of a company's global revenue, potentially amounting to billions in the case of a company such as TikTok. However a data access fine for Netflix, following Noyb's earlier action, only landed the streamer with a €4.75 million fine in 2024.
TikTok, AliExpress and WeChat were contacted for comment on the complaints but had not responded at the time of publication.
(nl)
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