Photo: ANP
Europe’s popular video app TikTok is working on a way to ensure user data doesn’t just end up in China. In this, the social media platform responds to the actions taken by, among others, the European Commission and the European Parliament to ban the app from the business devices of its employees.
TikTok is owned by Chinese technology company ByteDance and has come under fire since the company admitted some employees had access to user data in the US and Europe. More and more governments and parliaments are banning TikTok on their employees’ work phones and other business devices for fear of data theft and espionage.
Theo Bertram, TikTok’s vice president of European public policy, acknowledges that there are “real concerns” among Western governments about China. “I think there is a greater obligation that we have to show how we secure our users’ data.”
According to him, TikTok will work in Europe in the same way as in the United States. In that country, where TikTok is no longer allowed to be used on the cellphones and tablets of many civil servants, a special deal has been signed with Oracle. This company ensures that the data of the American user is stored on servers in the United States itself and does not leave the country.
“We’re working on three new data centers and we’ll also be working with a partner,” Bertram says about the approach to Europe, without naming the partner and giving further details. TikTok has about 150 million users in Europe, of which 25 million are in the UK. The application has more than a billion users around the world.
