Sept. 5 (UPI) — TikTok on Tuesday said its new $400 million data center in Ireland is up and running with the migration of the data of its European customers to the facility underway.
The center in the Irish capital, Dublin, is the first of three the Chinese-owned company is building as part of a drive to build a “specially-reinforced environment” around the data of its 150 million European users, TikTok said in a news release.
A second location in Ireland is currently under construction along with a third in Norway.
The centers are part of a data protection strategy for Europe based on the principles of storing data locally, minimizing data transfers outside of the region; and further reducing employee access to TikTok user data — a response to fears the platform could be commandeered by the Chinese Communist Party to spy on Western capitals.
In June, the European Parliament called for a ban on the app across all 27 member states citing the possibility of foreign interference following a slew of bans on TikTok on government-owned devices in countries from the United States and Canada to Britain.
Weeks later, a bipartisan group of U.S. Senators and House members introduced legislation to stop employees of foreign corporations like TikTok from accessing U.S. data from abroad.
That followed a demand in March by the Biden administration’s Treasury Department Committee on Foreign Investment that the Chinese-owned company sell to a new owner or face a ban in the United States.
“We’ve committed to storing our European user data locally by default,” said TikTok Vice President Public Policy Europe Theo Bertram, adding that European security provider NCC would independently audit and verify the new data controls and protections, monitor data flows and report incidents.
“As the independent security provider, NCC Group will monitor data coming in and out of the secure environment to independently validate that only approved employees can access limited data types. NCC Group will perform ongoing security assessments of the new security gateways we are building around European user data, the TikTok app, our data centers, and other TikTok infrastructure.”
Bertram said NCC Group would also serve as a managed security services provider for TikTok’s security gateways, performing real-time monitoring to identify and respond to any suspicious or anomalous access attempts and provide assurance on the integrity of the enhanced security controls operations.
NCC will validate that all network traffic of TikTok’s European user data passes through the security gateways.
“All of these controls and operations are designed to ensure that the data of our European users is safeguarded in a specially-designed protective environment, and can only be accessed by approved employees subject to strict independent oversight and verification,” said Bertram.
TikTok and NCC Group will engage with policymakers across Europe in the coming months to explain how this comprehensive system will work in practice, he added.
