“This is the latest story in the avalanche of evidence showing that individuals—not Big Tech platforms—should control their own data,” Project Liberty President Tomicah Tilleman told Fortune in an exclusive statement.
Earlier this year, the Supreme Court upheld a law forcing TikTok’s Chinese parent company ByteDance to sell its U.S. operations to an American company. The law passed because of concerns the Chinese government might have access to U.S. user data, potentially representing a national security threat.
On Friday, Ireland’s Data Protection Commission, which regulates TikTok because its European headquarters is in Ireland, fined the company $600 million for failing to protect the personal data of EU users from being accessed by Chinese authorities. TikTok allegedly violated the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the EU’s strict data privacy law that limits how large platforms can share and store user information.
TikTok said it will appeal the charges and denied violating the EU’s law. TikTok “has never received a request for European user data from the Chinese authorities, and has never provided European user data to them,” the company said in a statement. TikTok did not respond to a request for comment about Project Liberty’s statement made outside of working hours in Europe.
Tilleman sees European and U.S. TikTok users facing similar threats to their personal data.
“Americans and Europeans both deserve digital platforms that are committed to protecting privacy, upholding national security, and putting people first,” he said.
The current version of social media allows companies to collect reams of data about users, which then gets used for targeted advertisements. Project Liberty sees acquiring TikTok and its roughly 170 million U.S. as a means to jumpstart its new vision of the internet.
“The People’s Bid for TikTok is the best way to complete a sale and transition the platform to an American-made tech stack that gives people control of their online experience,” Tilleman said.
