TikTok Employs NCC Cybersecurity to Audit its Data and Provide Verification

As part of the social media company's data security regime, dubbed "Project Clover," TikTok has hired British cybersecurity firm NCC to audit its data controls and protections and provide independent verification.

Several government agencies have banned TikTok from their employees' phones, citing growing concerns about the company, which is owned by the Chinese firm ByteDance, and whether China's government could harvest users' data to further its own interests.

TikTok is opening three data centers as part of the regime, two in Ireland and one in Norway, to store user data in Europe.

The first Irish datacenter is already online, and TikTok has started to migrate data. The remaining data centers will be up by the end of 2024, Elaine Fox, head of privacy in Europe, said in a media call.

"We are not waiting for our European data centers to be fully operational... we have already begun storing personal data for our EEA and UK users by default in a designated secure area known as the European enclave, which is hosted in the interim in the United States," she explained.

TikTok and NCC have stated that they will engage with policymakers across Europe in the coming months to explain how the system will work in practice.

TikTok announced Project Clover in March amid rising concerns about data security from lawmakers on both sides of the Atlantic.