About Us
TikTok’s commitment to European data security
TikTok is where creativity thrives. Over 150 million people across Europe come to our platform every month to express themselves, learn new hobbies or skills and grow their business. With such scale comes significant responsibility – building trust by ensuring the safety, privacy and security of our community and their data is critical.
Since TikTok launched in Europe, we have established and rapidly scaled our European Privacy and Data Protection team. We engage with industry experts and regulatory authorities on privacy and data protection issues and industry challenges, with a view to finding practical solutions that meet the requirements of European data protection laws.
In 2021, we set out a clear data governance strategy for Europe based on the principles of storing data locally; minimising data transfers outside of the region; and further reducing employee access to TikTok user data.
We’re now going beyond existing regulations and introducing a number of industry-leading measures to further strengthen our data security and protections in Europe.
Project Clover is a program to create a specially-designed protective environment for our European user data, consisting of a number of different innovative elements:
Data storage in Europe
TikTok’s user data is currently stored securely in the US, Singapore and Malaysia. We are now opening three new data centres in Ireland and Norway, which will become the default storage location for our European user data. Our first data centre in Dublin, Ireland, is now operational and migration of European user data to the centre has begun, with the other two data centres under construction. These data centres will represent a total annual investment of €1.2bn.
New security gateways
Building on our work in the US, we are constructing additional security gateways that will form a highly secure barrier around our European data. This will build on our existing work to reduce access to European user data by employees outside of Europe and further enhance our current controls, provide additional checks and protections and significantly restrict access even further. These gateways will determine employee access to our European user data and data transfers outside of Europe, as well as further strengthening protections against any unauthorised access. Any limited data access will have to first go through these gateways and additional checks.
Independent third-party oversight: NCC Group
This process will be overseen, checked and verified by an independent third-party European security company who will audit our data controls and protections, monitor data flows, provide independent verification and report any incidents.
Globally respected cybersecurity firm NCC Group will provide this independent oversight. NCC is TIBER-EU accredited and a UK National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) approved CHECK company.
NCC Group will provide multiple security services, including 24/7, 365 day security monitoring of the Security Gateways we are building around our European data, and security assessments of the TikTok platform itself.
We believe this consistent independent oversight and checks on our data security processes will be unprecedented amongst our competitors.
Privacy-enhancing technologies
We are also working with third-parties on building privacy-enhancing technologies into these already robust procedures. This includes pseudonymisation of data that may need to flow for global interoperability, so that an individual cannot be identified without additional information, aggregation of individual data points into large data sets and differential privacy to prevent linking of relevant information to particular individuals.
Setting a new standard in European data security
With Project Clover, we’ll move from meeting industry standards to setting a new standard altogether when it comes to data security.
A dedicated internal team has been working on Project Clover since last year and we will be implementing these novel and industry-leading measures throughout this year and into 2024.
TikTok is dedicated to remaining clear and transparent about how our business operates, especially as it relates to keeping user data private and our platform secure. We will continue to use this site to keep our stakeholders informed on milestones related to Project Clover, news related to how we are keeping users safe, and updates around our future plans. We want all of our community to have the utmost confidence in the security of TikTok, so they can continue to share, create, learn, and find joy.