In the face of the distrust of European public authorities, the TikTok application, owned by the Chinese giant ByteDance, announced that it is working with a European “partner” to ensure that the data of its users is not transferred to China.
The “Tik Tok” platform announced on Wednesday that its users’ data will be stored, starting this year, in three centers, two of which are in Ireland and one in Norway, to reassure European public authorities that have expressed a lack of confidence in them.
Eileen Fox, TikTok’s chief privacy officer for Europe, said in an online briefing that European users’ data is currently stored in Singapore and the United States.
In the face of the distrust of European public authorities, the video-sharing application TikTok, owned by the Chinese giant ByteDance, announced that it was working with a European “partner” to ensure that the data of its users was not transferred to China, similar to the measures taken in the United States.
Theo Bertram, vice president responsible for public policy in Europe, announced that this project, called “Clover”, has a value of 1.2 billion euros and began work on it six months ago, and will allow TikTok employees to restrict access to data.
“As we have done in the United States, we will build a secure environment around this data to prevent access to it from outside the region,” he added.
One of the platform’s global heads, ByteDance General Counsel Eric Andersen, is on a tour of Europe this week. He spoke with political officials in Brussels, London and Paris, and is due to travel to The Hague.
The “TikTok” platform seeks to provide guarantees to Europeans and Americans after many governments and institutions banned the application from their employees’ work devices, citing data security concerns.
Both the European Parliament and the European Commission banned the application from mobile devices, as well as the Danish Parliament. The Czech cybersecurity agency, NUKEB, warned on Wednesday that the app posed a “security threat” if it was installed on devices with sensitive data.
Europe is the largest market for TikTok, with 150 million users, including 25 million in the UK. Globally, the app has more than a billion users.
