Social media giant TikTok has begun moving its European user data to its new data center in Norway, provided by Green Mountain.
TikTok announced that the first building in their Norwegian data center is now operational and that migration of European user data from the US has begun. This is the second of TikTok's European data centers to come online; their first data center in Ireland came operational last year. Data from European users is now stored by default on TikTok's data centers in the US, Ireland and now in Norway. The Norwegian campus is being provided by Green Mountain, a partnership that was announced last year.
Owned by Chinese company ByteDance, several EU countries raised concerns about TikTok and data privacy. In an attempt to alleviate some of these concerns, TikTok launched “Project Clover", of which moving user data to a 'dedicated European enclave' is one aspect. TikTok also announced that the independent security provider NCC Group has begun 'continuous monitoring of the security gateway environments that provide additional protection to our European data.' It says that 'these additional barriers control access to data through supervised security gateways designed to enforce technical protocols that mean only approved employees can access certain data types.' For instance, 'phone numbers and IP addresses cannot be accessed by employees based in China'.
