TikTok launched the “Clover Project” (Project Clover), proposing to spend $1.2 billion a year on measures to protect more than 150 million European users, and promised to store European TikTok user data locally.
Plans include opening two data centers in Ireland within weeks and a third in Norway later this year. TikTok said that European user data currently stored in Singapore and the United States will be transferred to these three centers. Once in use, the total annual investment in the three data centers will amount to 1.2 billion euros.
Theo Bertram, TikTok’s vice president of European government relations, said the company also plans to eventually announce a European partner who will oversee how the app handles data on the continent. TikTok is already working with the partner, but is not yet ready to announce its name, he said.
Sources said TikTok executives told British policymakers on Monday that the company is a technology company that has offered unprecedented transparency and independent oversight, especially compared with Meta, the parent company of U.S. social media platform Facebook. Wait for competitors.
Some participants at TikTok’s UK briefing said they appreciated the company’s hard work to demonstrate transparency, but were still skeptical of claims spread by the US that “TikTok could hand over user data to Chinese authorities.” A TikTok company spokesman said on Monday the company would soon announce details of industry-leading data security measures it plans to implement in Europe.
According to sources, TikTok executives who participated in the briefing included its general counsel in the United States, Erich Andersen (Erich Andersen). Executives told British policymakers at the briefing that the plan would eventually store European users’ data on computer servers in Europe.
TikTok also plans to hire a European third-party company to independently oversee the platform’s operations in Europe to prevent unauthorized data transfers, and Oracle of the United States will oversee TikTok’s changes to its video recommendation system, the sources said.
TikTok executives said they had held discussions with the UK’s National Cyber Security Center (NCSC), one of the UK’s intelligence services, the sources said. TikTok executives said they believed the NCSC did not view the way TikTok handled its user data as risky, the sources said.
The report pointed out that TikTok executives have previously introduced the “Texas Plan” to US politicians and regulators. The plan is different from its European counterpart because the “Texas Plan” promised Washington that US user data will not be stored in TikTok’s own servers are stored instead on the servers of TikTok’s partner, Oracle Corporation of America, in Austin, Texas.
For some time, the United States has been suppressing TikTok in the name of “national security”. Former U.S. President Trump issued an executive order in 2020 to ban TikTok from operating in the United States, but lost a series of court battles against the measure. According to Reuters, TikTok completed the migration of American users’ data information to Oracle’s servers in June last year, thus addressing the concerns of US regulators. However, FCC Commissioner Brandon Carr still recommended that the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States take action to ban TikTok from operating in the United States in November last year.
The Wall Street Journal report also mentioned that in recent months, the U.S. federal government and some state governments, as well as the European Union and Canada have announced bans on their government employees from using TikTok on work devices. U.S. allies Britain and Australia have not followed suit and implemented such bans.