TikTok It is going through one of the most complex moments since it landed in the West, due to the growing accusations of espionage that fall on ByteDance, the Chinese company that develops it. However, from the company they have an ambitious plan to avoid the blockade in Europe.
As reported The Wall Street Journal, the first stop for TikTok executives was London. There, they met with British lawmakers to discuss how they intend to protect the privacy of European users. For this they plan to launch what is known as Project Cloveran initiative that involves construction of two data centers in Ireland.
There, TikTok promises to store the information linked to user accounts in Europe. But his plan goes even further. The company also intends to hire an independent European firm to monitor the operation of the app to prevent any unauthorized attempts at data transfer. as long as will rely on Oracle to analyze the changes that are applied to the video recommendation algorithm. The latter, to silence doubts about the use of the platform for propaganda purposes.
The attempt to achieve the approval of the British legislators seems to be the first step to try to show greater transparency in Europe. Let’s remember that TikTok has just suffered a severe blow in the European Union, since, although it is not banned at a general level, its use on mobile phones by officials and employees of the European Commission has been prohibited.
Winning the support of the United Kingdom could be crucial to later trying to change its image within the EU. After all, it is not a minor detail that the new datacenters of TikTok are built in Ireland, which is part of the European bloc. Today the platform has 150 million active users per month in Europe, of which 125 million are from European Union countries.
Project CloverTikTok’s plan to avoid the veto in Europe
TikTok’s plan to demonstrate transparency in Europe may be more complex than the company imagines. The Wall Street Journal indicates that, according to some of the legislators who participated in the presentation, skepticism persists about how much ByteDance can deny a hypothetical request from China to hand over the data of its users. Despite this, they stressed that the company strives to show a clearer management of public information.
The truth is Project Clover appears on the scene shortly after TikTok presented Project Texas in United States. Although his plan to avoid the blockade in North American territory differs markedly from the one that has been presented in the United Kingdom and that will cover all European users.
TikTok’s US initiative is not about establishing its own data centers to store the information of users from that country. On the contrary, the social network has proposed delegate its management to a cloud infrastructure provided by Oracle. However, the fine print of the agreement has not been finalized, which has led to delays in the negotiation with the White House.
For now, the use of TikTok is already prohibited on official mobiles of the government of the United States, Canada and the European Commission. But the specter of a general lockdown still hangs over ByteDance’s headquarters.