The story between TikTok and the European Union is a long tug-of-war that, unlike many situations with other big companies, has reached a positive turning point. The credit for this goes to the ByteDance-owned application itself, which put up a lot of money and a detailed project to meet the demands of the Brussels institutions. The reference is to storing and processing European users’ personal data, with Project Clover and an investment of €12 billion over the next ten years. These important numbers are for a region that sometimes struggles to find a foothold with big American tech, which TikTok summarises as ‘a security programme that provides European users’ data with a state-of-the-art protection system‘.
TikTok – Europe
The warning from the European institutions came after TikTok stored the data of some 150 million monthly active users in Europe in servers spread across the United States, Singapore and Malaysia. Also prompting the need to revise the plans were the intrusions of the company’s employees who spied on some American journalists to trace their sources. The guilty plea and removal of the offending employees was the first move by which TikTok attempted to resolve the issue, even though ByteDance had already worked out a governance change for European user data in 2021. With Project Clover, the threshold is raised because everything will remain within European borders, with potential access to data requiring a series of security checks that complicate any attempts by snoopers.
At the heart of the project are the data centres, two in Ireland and one in Norway, chosen anything but casually as they provide practical advantages. The two countries have ideal climatic conditions for a sustainable project, as the low temperatures help keep the servers at the right level by reducing the energy required. When fully operational, the data centre in Hamar, 120 km away from Oslo, will be the largest on the continent and will be powered by 100% renewable energy (in line with TikTok’s goal of becoming carbon neutral by 2030), emerging as the most energy efficient, producing energy that will be used by other companies in the area, so that they too will reduce their environmental impact.
European facilities
The three facilities are currently at different stages of operation, as the end of 2024 is the target period for completing the transfer of European user data to the continental borders. Until then, the data will be stored on servers located in the United States. No criteria behind the division of data between the three European data centres have been disclosed at the moment, with TikTok assuring that it has sufficient space to store the information of current and future European users, hoping for future growth. In recent weeks, TikTok inaugurated the first large area of the three that make up the Norwegian data centre (130 x 24 metres and 12,000 square metres on three floors are the measurements of each building). At the same time, the other two will be delivered by mid-2024 by Green Mountain, a Norwegian company that designs and builds innovative and sustainable data centres.
In addition to the Norwegian data centre and the two in Ireland, TikTok has announced that the €12 billion it will invest in Europe over ten years will be used to develop and refine technologies to enhance user privacy and also to support its partnership with NCC Group. This independent cybersecurity company will oversee activities by protecting European users’ data and monitoring flows and reports of any problems and anomalies.
