Faced with distrust from authorities, social network TikTok announced on Tuesday that it had started hosting its European users’ data in Ireland to allay fears about its Chinese shareholders.

“Our first data center in Dublin, Ireland is now operational and the migration of European user data to this center has already begun, while our other two centers in Norway and Ireland are under construction,” the subsidiary of Chinese giant ByteDance said in a press release .

This transfer should last until the end of 2024, when the three data centers will be in operation. This project, called Clover, announced in March, represents an annual investment of 1.2 billion euros for TikTok.

It has also partnered with UK cybersecurity firm NCC Group, which is responsible for conducting an ‘independent audit’ of implemented data protection measures, ‘monitoring data flow’ and ‘reporting any incidents’.

Some data will continue to be transmitted

Modeled on the measures imposed on the social network in the US, these provisions aim to prevent ByteDance employees based in China from accessing Europeans’ “private data”, TikTok officials said during a conference call with reporters.

This protected data includes the real name of the user, their e-mail address, their telephone number or the IP address of their end devices as well as personal data within the meaning of European regulations.

On the other hand, certain aggregated data that is public or required for network interoperability will continue to circulate and be hosted off-continent.

When asked, TikTok did not want to disclose the proportion of data already transferred from the current data centers in the USA and Singapore. The social network had already drafted a plan for local storage of European users’ data in August 2020, which had not yet seen the light of day.

“I am following the implementation of this commitment very closely, particularly during my meetings with TikTok executives. It’s just a start. We remain vigilant and will not let up our efforts,” French digital minister Jean-Noël Barrot reacted on Tuesday on social network X (ex-Twitter).

The application has been banned from the phone by some officials

TikTok now has 150 million users in the United States and 134 million in the European Economic Area. The company claims full legal separation from its offices in China and has consistently denied any data disclosure to Chinese authorities.

But the parent company ByteDance had to recognize in December 2022 that employees had access to the data of two American journalists in the course of an internal investigation into data leaks.

Since then, countries like Australia, Belgium and Canada, as well as the European Commission, have banned the entertainment app from their officials’ work phones. The US state of Montana has announced a total ban on the app, but the decision is open to appeal.