In recent weeks, the European Commission, European Parliament and other institutions have instructed staff to delete the app off their work phones. Now, the company wants to convince European governments that it is an industry leader in data protection.
The company outlined plans on Wednesday to build three European data centres which will cost $1.3 billion to store information on TikTok’s 150 million users in the region locally with the help of an independent third company that will oversee data access controls. With these investments, the company wants to show that they will not give Europeans’ data to China.
Theo Bertram, TikTok’s European policy chief, told that the Chinese government has never asked them for data and said ‘if they would, we would refuse to do so.‘
European data is currently stored in data centres in Singapore and the US, but will be migrated to secure environment in Europe, built by a European company, over three years, Bertram said.
Company employees outside Europe will still be able to access the data, but only for specific reasons and with strict access protocols that another company will audit.