TikTok was hit with a massive EU fine of 530 million euros ($600 million) Friday, accused of sending personal data of Europeans to China and failing to guarantee it was shielded from access by Chinese authorities.

The Chinese-owned social media giant, which is also in the crosshairs of the United States, acknowledged during a probe that it has hosted European data in China, contrary to a previous denial, according go Ireland's data protection watchdog.

One of the largest fines ever imposed by the authority followed a probe into the lawfulness of data transfers by TikTok.

In 2023 Ireland's Data Protection Commission (DPC) fined TikTok -- which has 1.5 billion users worldwide -- 345 million euros for breaches of European rules on processing child data.

As TikTok -- a division of Chinese tech giant ByteDance -- has its European headquarters in Ireland, the Irish authority is the lead regulator in Europe for the social platform, as well as others like Google, Meta and X.

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