Brussels: Chinese social media company TikTok is planning to open two more data centers in Europe, a senior executive said on Friday, a move that could ease concerns over the security of users’ data and ease regulatory pressure on the company. Could
TikTok is trying to reassure governments and regulators that users’ personal data cannot be accessed and its content manipulated by the Communist Party of China or anyone else under Beijing’s influence.
The short video-sharing app owned by China’s ByteDance aims to expand its European data storage, said Rich Waterworth, general manager for TikTok’s Europe operations, in a blog post.
“We are at an advanced stage of finalizing a plan for a second data center in Ireland with a third-party service provider, in addition to the site announced last year,” he said.
“We are also in talks to set up a third data center in Europe to further our planned operations in Ireland. European TikTok user data will begin migrating this year, Waterworth said, continuing through 2024.
The company on Friday reported an average of 125 million monthly active users in the European Union between August 2022 and January 2023, subject to EU online content regulations known as the Digital Services Act (DSA).
The DSA labels companies with more than 45 million users as very large online platforms and requires them to manage risk, conduct external and independent auditing, share data with authorities and researchers, and adopt codes of conduct.
The European Commission gave online platforms and search engines until 17 February to publish their monthly active users. Very large online platforms have four months to comply with the rules or risk fines.
Twitter said on Thursday that it has 100.9 million average monthly users in the European Union, based on estimates for the last 45 days.
Alphabet provided one set of numbers based on users’ accounts and another set based on signed-out recipients, stating that users could access its services whether they signed in to an account or when they signed out. Get out
It said the average monthly number of signed-in users totaled 278.6 million on Google Maps, 274.6 million on Google Play, 332 million on Google Search, 74.9 million on Shopping and 401.7 million on YouTube.
Earlier this week, Meta Platforms said it had 255 million average monthly active users on Facebook in the European Union and about 250 million average monthly active users on Instagram in the last six months of 2022.
(Reporting by Fu Yun Chi; Editing by Sandra Maler)
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