ALBAWABA — TikTok on Wednesday launched its anticipatory counteroffensive strategy to soften Western leaders' worries over data security and Chinese surveillance, as their governments consider further bans on the video-sharing app.
Western powers, including the European Union and the United States, have taken a tough approach to the app, which is owned by Chinese company ByteDance, many calling for its ban on data security issues.
The company is being investigated by the lead E.U. privacy regulator, the Irish Data Protection Commission, over potentially illegal data transfers of E.U. users’ data to China.
There are also fears that companies, such as TikTok, could be legally forced to hand over data to the Chinese government, under China’s national intelligence law of 2017.
To ease fears, TikTok replies that it is not a Chinese company and would not have to hand over any data.
Furthermore, TikTok, which stores its global user data in the U.S. and Singapore, has denied its data or algorithms can be accessed or manipulated, saying TikTok it has never provided data to the Chinese government, neither has it ever been asked to so.
The company’s solution, codenamed Project Clover, involves user data being stored on two servers in Ireland and Norway at an annual cost of 1.2 billion euros, while any data transfers outside Europe will be vetted by a third-party information technology company, Theo Bertram, TikTok's vice president of European public policy said in an online briefing, adding that the changes started six months ago and will continue to be implemented throughout this year and into 2024.
TikTok executives said the company was working with an unnamed third-party European security company to oversee and check how it handles European users' data, insisting this plan would reduce its own employees' access to user data.
"In the same way we have done... in the U.S., we'll build a secure environment around that data to prevent access from outside of the region," Bertram said.
"That process is there to ensure a level of data sovereignty that we believe goes beyond what any company has done, and indeed believe what any of our peers said was possible," Bertram added.
In the U.S., TikTok uses Oracle to keep U.S. users' data in the country safe from unwanted eyes.
"Our approach is very much open to governments, regulators, [and] experts to give us their advice on how we can do this even more effectively. But if the concern is data access, we believe in this solution," Bertram said.
TikTok said it would introduce pseudonymization, a data management and de-identification procedure by which personally identifiable information fields within a data record are replaced by one or more artificial identifiers, or pseudonyms, to help further protect personal data so an individual could not be identified without additional information.
