TikTok will host European user data in Ireland

After promising it in 2020, ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok, gives news of its intentions regarding data hosting in Europe. Through a blog post, the company indicated that the personal data of European users will be hosted in Ireland from 2023.

“Today we are taking a further step with the signing of a contract with a data center in Europe that will host the data of TikTok users from the United Kingdom and the European Union.comments the company on its blog. Working with a third-party service provider established at a site currently under construction, our data center operations will begin in early 2023 with ramp-up throughout the year.”.

TikTok specifies that it has long stored its users’ data in Singapore and the United States and that this new approach will allow it to “to stay [aligné] with European data sovereignty objectives” as well as “to minimize data flows outside Europe”. The Chinese company is mainly complying with the new legislation on digital markets, the Digital Markets Act (DMA), after the agreement announced by the EU on March 24.

The DMA, which explicitly targets large platforms, will come into force in October 2022. Another text, the Digital Services Act, or DSA, is still under negotiation.