Author: Elaine Fox, Head of Privacy, Europe

Beginning today, we are providing notification of updates to our Privacy Policy for the European Economic Area, United Kingdom and Switzerland (collectively "Europe"). We continually strive to improve disclosures of relevant information to our users and this new update represents a continuation of that process. The updates apply only to our Privacy Policy for Europe and include greater transparency into how we share user information outside of Europe and how we collect user location information.

Where We Store User Data and Who Can Access It Building on our ongoing work to advance our data security around the world, we are continuing to make progress in our approach to Data Governance in Europe. Our efforts are centred on limiting the number of employees with access to European user data, minimising data flows outside of the region, and storing European user data locally.

While our work on data governance in Europe continues, TikTok remains a connected community of over one billion people around the world. In order to operate a global platform designed for sharing joyful content, we rely on a global workforce to ensure that our community's TikTok experience is consistent, enjoyable and safe.

We currently store European user data in the U.S. and Singapore. Based on a demonstrated need to do their job, subject to a series of robust security controls and approval protocols, and by way of methods that are recognised under the GDPR, we allow certain employees within our corporate group located in Brazil, Canada, China, Israel, Japan, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, South Korea, and the United States remote access to TikTok European user data. Our security controls include system access controls, encryption and network security.

How We Collect Location Information

Our updated Privacy Policy also provides information about different ways that European user location information may be collected. For example, when users create a video, they can choose to manually add a location to their video, such as tourist attractions or other points of interest. Alternatively, they can choose to turn on Location Services for TikTok within their device settings to allow TikTok to collect location information from the device. TikTok does not collect precise location information, whether based on GPS technology or otherwise, from users in Europe. See our Help Center article for more information.

TikTok strives to be open and transparent about how we collect and process our users' information. We'll continue to work to earn and build trust with our community with updates centred on transparency into our data practices and the investments we're making in the people, processes, and technology to keep our community safe.