TikTok launched Project Clover to alleviate the West's fears that the short-video hosting service is spying on China by providing Beijing with its users' data.
The campaign aims to convince European regulators that there are sufficient oversights domestically to prevent user data from being funneled to the Chinese government. TikTok is now in the process of establishing two European data centers, one located in Ireland. These are meant to segregate the continent's collected information from Chinese systems.
TikTok's Project Clover
Furthermore, the company said it would hire a third party to oversee its European sector to alleviate other nations' concerns. Officials noted that Project Clover echoes the US-focused Project Texas, which seeks to offer some oversight of domestic data collection to the federal government.
The cost of the Project Texas proposal alone is expected to go for more than $1 billion. The worries come as ByteDance LTD, TikTok's parent company, is mandated under Chinese law to share its data with the Chinese Community Party (CCP) whenever requested, as per Fox News.
Due to this obligation, the application has been banned for use on various state-owned electronic devices in several states in the United States and others at the federal level due to cybersecurity concerns.
Congress on Wednesday voted to give US President Joe Biden the power to ban the application as TikTok said that every account held by a user under the age of 18 years is given a default 60-minute daily screen time. White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said the government was working on solving the TikTok security concerns.
TikTok's new project aims to allow the third party to monitor data flows, which would make it more challenging to identify individual users using only data. The company planned to add "security gateways" to provide an extra layer of control over employee access to European user information and data transfers outside of the region.
Alleviating Western Nations' Cybersecurity Concerns
The two planned data centers, which cost roughly $1.25 billion yearly, will be powered by renewable energy. TikTok has been working on Project Clover since last year in an attempt to appease demands from Western nations over cybersecurity issues, according to BBC.
Theo Bertram, TikTok's vice-president of government relations and public policy in Europe, said they were ahead of the curve because they are trying to earn Western nations' trust.
TikTok's back has been against the wall over concerns about its security, and it is fighting to prove that it does not pose a national security threat. The executives who unveiled Project Clover repeatedly said they plan to go further than other major social networks to protect their users' privacy.
Bertram said that the proposed project is there to ensure t level of data sovereignty that would go beyond what any other company has done. He said that it also goes beyond what their peers said was even possible, said Politico.
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