Paris (AFP)

The Chinese application of entertaining videos TikTok, at the heart of Sino-American tensions, is the subject of investigations by the personal data gendarme, who is wondering about several points, including the modalities of its establishment in the European Union, CNIL told AFP, confirming information from Bloomberg.

"The Cnil began investigations concerning the tiktok.com site and the TikTok application from May 2020," a spokesperson for the regulator told AFP on Tuesday. At that time, however, a complaint had been filed on "a request to delete a video" and "the complainant was invited to exercise his rights" directly with Tiktok.

But the regulator has since continued its investigations and "examines in particular the question of the establishment of TikTok in the European Union". Owned by the Chinese start-up ByteDance, TikTok announced earlier this year the installation of a regional center in Europe, located in Dublin, which would designate the Irish data regulation authority as "the head authority of file "for future European investigations.

"To come under the sole jurisdiction of the Irish authority and not of each of the authorities, TikTok will nevertheless have to prove that its establishment in Ireland meets the conditions of a + main establishment + within the meaning of the GDPR", the general regulation on European data protection, the CNIL said.

Finally, the CNIL noted other "points of attention", including "the problems of informing individuals, those of the methods of exercising rights, flows outside the EU, measures taken with regard to minors, ”she added.

TikTok announced in early August its intention to also install its first data center in Ireland, to store European user data, representing an investment of around 420 million euros.

The announcement comes at a time when the app, which is very popular with young people, is at the heart of economic and diplomatic tensions between China and the United States.

Donald Trump put pressure on the Chinese group ByteDance to sell TikTok to Microsoft or another American company before mid-September, otherwise they could no longer operate in the United States.

Washington has accused TikTok for months of being used by Chinese intelligence services for surveillance purposes.

The platform has always firmly denied any data sharing with the Chinese authorities and recalls that its data centers are located outside of China.

© 2020 AFP