BRUSSELS: A senior executive at Chinese social media company TikTok said on Friday that the company plans to open two more data centres in Europe. This could ease worries about the security of user data and make it easier for regulators to deal with the company.
TikTok has been trying to show governments and regulators that China’s Communist Party or anyone else under Beijing’s control can’t get to users’ personal information or change the content of the app.
ByteDance, a company in China, owns the short video-sharing app TikTok. TikTok’s general manager for operations in Europe, Rich Waterworth, said in a blog post that the company wants to add more data storage in Europe.
“We are close to finishing a plan with a third-party service provider for a second data centre in Ireland, in addition to the site announced last year,” he said.
“We are also in talks about opening a third data centre in Europe, which would add to the operations we plan to start in Ireland. The data of European TikTok users will start moving this year and continue until 2024 “Waterworth told him.
Friday, the company said that it had an average of 125 million monthly active users in the EU between August 2022 and January 2023. This means that it has to follow stricter EU online content rules called the Digital Services Act (DSA).
The DSA calls companies with more than 45 million users “very large online platforms” and requires them to do risk management, external and independent audits, share data with authorities and researchers, and sign a code of conduct.
The European Commission gave online platforms and search engines until February 17 to report how many active users they had each month. There are four months for very large online platforms to follow the rules or face fines.
Based on the last 45 days, Twitter said Thursday that it has an average of 100.9 million users in the EU every month.
Alphabet (GOOGL.O) gave users one set of numbers based on their accounts and another set based on whether they were signed in or not. It said that users can use its services whether they are signed in or not.
It said that, on average, 278.6 million people signed in to Google Maps, 274.6 million signed in to Google Play, 332 million signed in to Google Search, 74.9 million signed in to Shopping, and 401.7 million signed in to YouTube.
This week, Meta Platform (META.O) said it had 255 million average monthly active users on Facebook in the EU and about 250 million average monthly active users on Instagram in the last six months of 2022.
