TikTok has announced a battery of measures to strengthen its privacy and try to appease the growing mistrust of regulators on both sides of the Atlantic. The video platform owned by the Chinese giant ByteDance will begin to store locally the data of European citizens.
The Clover Project, as it has been named, will thus open two new data centers in the territory of the European Union (EU). One will be in Dublin, Irelandwhere a similar center already exists and where the company has its offices in Europa. The other will be located at Norway, more specifically in the Hamar region. At the moment it is unknown which company will manage these centers, although TikTok sources confirm it will be a European provider.
Until now, European user data has been stored on servers in the United States with backups in Singapore. The migration process to European servers started in 2021 will last until next year. So Europe will be the default location for that data. This change has meant a total annual investment of 1,200 million euros.
wave of restrictions
TikTok’s strategic gesture responds to the growing restrictions that have been imposed on the application. On February 23, the European Commission, the European Parliament and the European Council prohibited the use of the app in the mobile of your staff. Barely four days later, it was the Canadian government that made the same decision. Both measures were preceded by what happened in USAwhere the use of TikTok has been prohibited on the devices of the entire federal administration as well as in more than half of the states of the country. spain it has not yet taken that path.
In all these cases, the wave of bans responds to the fear of the authorities, who believe that TikTok could serve for the espionage of China. Although that alleged back door has yet to be proven, the scandal caused by the revelation that employees used TikTok to monitor Forbes journalists has not helped the company.
In November, TikTok indicated that its workers in up to 10 countries could manage data from European users, a deal that would serve to improve the experience and operation of the application, something common on other platforms. The company has stressed today that it will reduce the transfer of data outside the region and employee access to that data. “Any access to the data will not only comply with the laws of protection but will also have to go through these additional security gateways and checks first,” the statement reads.
The change announced this Tuesday will affect EU citizens, but also those of the United Kingdom, Norway, Iceland and Liechtenstein. More than 150 million people in those countries use TikTok every month.