Data defence

The decision comes as political pressure mounts in the US to ban the app due to its links to China through its parent company, ByteDance, which is based in Beijing. On Tuesday, March 7, the White House gave its support to a bill that could allow the government to ban TikTok. Under Project Clover, user data will be stored on servers in Ireland and Norway with any data transfers outside Europe vetted by a third­party IT company. The use of the outsourced data servers are estimated to cost TikTok €1.2 billion each year. Project Clover will also anonymise personal data so that individual users cannot be identified without additional information by global TikTok employees who can access app data.

Tiktok has more than one billion users worldwide, 250 million of which are in Europe.