By Madeline Moncrieff, Director of Legal and Corporate Affairs, EMEA; Cormac Keenan, Head of Trust and Safety, EMEA

We want to let our community in Europe know about some updates we're making to our Privacy Policy and Terms of Service. Before our users receive an in-app notification about the changes, we want to explain what's changing and why. 

Since we launched in Europe, we have invested in local talent, created a regional senior leadership team, and set up essential business functions in the region because we believe this is the best way to support our growing TikTok community here. 

It has been humbling to see so many enjoy the creativity of the TikTok community, and we now have over 1,000 employees in Europe, with 800 of our people based in the UK and Ireland. As we have expanded across the region, TikTok Ireland has become responsible for maintaining users' privacy and safety in Europe. Our Trust and Safety Hub in Dublin allows us to focus on strengthening policies, technologies, and moderation strategies to keep our community safe, while our new data privacy team will focus on upholding the highest standards of data protection. This work is overseen by the Office of the Data Protection Officer to drive accountability and encourage a culture of privacy awareness and compliance.

As we continue to develop our local teams to support our community, we are making an important change to our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy. From July 29th, TikTok's Irish and UK entities will take over from TikTok Inc, our US entity, to provide TikTok to users in Europe and manage and safeguard their personal data.

Other updates to the Privacy Policy and Terms of Service

We have taken the opportunity to make our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy more comprehensive and transparent as well as providing users who are aged between 13 and 17 in Europe with a summary of our Privacy Policy.

We have also provided further details about the type of information we collect, how we use it, and who we share information with. We have added details about when we may ask you to provide proof of identity or age to use certain features, such as Live.

Protecting our community's privacy and data continues to be our priority. Today's announcement is part of our ongoing work to develop local teams to create the best experience for the TikTok community.

From July 29th, TikTok Technology Limited (TikTok Ireland) and TikTok Information Technologies Limited (TikTok UK) will become data controllers for users in the EEA, Switzerland and the UK. The service provider for EEA/Swiss users will change to TikTok Ireland, and the service provider for UK users will change to TikTok UK.