China calls out 105 apps, including TikTok, Kuaishou, and LinkedIn, for the illegal collection and use of personal user data and gives them 15 days to fix
105 apps, including some of the country's most popular short video platforms, were put on notice by the Cyberspace Administration …
Context & Ripple Effects
This notice lands mid-escalation: three weeks earlier the Cyberspace Administration flagged 33 apps from Baidu and Tencent with a 10-working-day rectification window (33 apps including Baidu and Tencent), then days later domestic app stores were ordered to pull 90 apps outright (90 apps removed from app stores). The 105-app list extends the campaign from niche workplace and utility apps to China's biggest consumer platforms — TikTok, Kuaishou, LinkedIn — signaling that even flagship short-video and professional-networking apps are not exempt.
What makes this round notable for LinkedIn specifically: its rival Maimai was already among the 90 apps pulled from stores under the new rules on what user data apps may collect, so the professional-networking category is being policed from both sides at once.
First-order effects
- TikTok, Kuaishou, and LinkedIn each have 15 days to fix illegal collection and use of personal data or face the same store-removal fate the 90 apps already received.
Second-order effects
- App-store placement is now the enforcement lever: platforms like ByteDance and Kuaishou must restructure data-collection flows across entire product lines, and any multinational operating in China (LinkedIn, Amazon per the later 145-app round) inherits the same compliance bar as domestic firms.
Third-order effects
- The cadence — 33 apps in early May, 105 here, 145 by July, then 106 apps actually delisted in December — shows the CAC converting a new personal-data regulation into a routine enforcement pipeline, where periodic mass naming-and-shaming precedes outright removal.
The trend: China is institutionalizing app-level data-governance enforcement, moving from warning lists toward automatic store removals as the standard penalty.