TikTok announced the Project Clovera data management proposal that serves to appease the concerns of EU politicians about Chinese surveillance. By locating the data, it should arrive that there can be no interference from Beijing.
TikTok, proposal to protect data in the EU (and avoid bans)
Two weeks after the introduction of the ban of the app on the devices of the officials of the European Union Due to data security concerns, the social media announced a plan on Wednesday to safeguard the data of Europeans from access by the Chinese government.
The plan focuses on retaining European user data sui server in Europa. And it gives a European security firm broad access to cyber security and data protection control.
Theo Bertram, European Vice-President for Government Relations and Public Policy, said: “This process has been designed to ensure a level of data sovereignty that we believe goes beyond what any other company has done and, in fact, we believe that none of the our competitors have said it is possible.”
TikTok calls the progetto “Project Clover”, complimentary plan to process i European data in Ireland (Country famous for clovers, or “clover”). But also in analogy with “Project Texas”, which promised similar controls to American legislators in 2020.
Il General Counsel of TikTok, Eric Andersen, is traveling to key capitals to personally deliver the message to policy makers. She traveled to London and Brussels this week and will visit The Hague and Paris soon.
Europe’s Clover Project will outsource TikTok’s data protection and controls to a third-party European security firm. The information of over 150 million European users of TikTok will be moved, starting this year and until 2024, to two data centers located in Dublin and a third in the Hamar region of Norway.
TikTok said the project has been in preparation since last year, before the EU announced a ban on the app on officers’ phones. But it seems that decision convinced Bytedance (the parent company of TikTok) to speed things up, to avoid further bans.