European TikTok users will have their personal information stored in the company’s first data center on the continent. This is an attempt by the Chinese company to alleviate fears that have been repeatedly expressed by EU leaders about the Chinese authorities’ access to sensitive user information. The facility is located in Dublin, to whose servers they are already migrating data from European citizens.
The maneuver comes after many critics who fear that the Chinese State could request access at any time to the data collected by TikTok, something that the app, owned by the Chinese company ByteDance, claims it has never done, although this has not stopped the data privacy concerns.
On the other hand, along with this opening of the data center, from TikTok they have also promised to allow a European security company access to audit cybersecurity and data protection controls, all under the umbrella of the ‘Clover Project’, referring to one of the symbols of Ireland.
TikTok is thus trying to respond to the government restrictions on its use for cybersecurity and privacy reasons that it has faced since the beginning of this year, when several institutions decided to ban the application on the devices of their officials, including the British Government, the European Parliament, the European Commission and the Council of the EU.
By transferring the data to servers in Dublin, TikTok seeks to reassure these institutions and regulators, who claimed that the Chinese government could access emails, contacts and other communications by having the application on the devices.
The data center in Dublin will not be the only one to open in Europe for TikTok, since the project is underway to open another in Ireland and another in the Norwegian region of Hamar, where the data of the more than 150 million will be transferred of European users of the well-known Chinese application.
