TikTok’s New Terms of Service Have Raised Concerns.
TikTok has undergone significant changes. On January 22, management of TikTok transferred from Chinese company ByteDance to TikTok USDS Joint Venture, a new entity backed by Larry Ellison’s Oracle, private equity firm Silver Lake, and UAE-based investment firm MGX.
A few days later, on January 23, TikTok introduced new Terms of Service for users. So far, the transition hasn’t been smooth. Users immediately expressed privacy concerns about the new Terms of Service, posting comments on social media along the lines of:
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Changes to TikTok’s privacy policy
While TikTok’s new terms and conditions sound draconian, they’re not much different from TikTok’s old terms and conditions (which were draconian). The main change concerns AI. The company added a new section to its terms and conditions stating that it will collect information from “interactions with AI, including prompts, questions, files, and other types of information you submit to our AI-powered interfaces, as well as the responses they generate,” so don’t assume your conversation will remain between you and the chatbot.
TikTok also states that it will collect “precise location data” unless users opt out. This will allow the service to collect a user’s exact coordinates, rather than a general city or region, which the company will use to display “personalized advertising and other sponsored content.”
Another change: TikTok now promises to comply with “applicable law, such as for permitted purposes under the California Consumer Privacy Act,” instead of the more general “applicable state privacy laws” it previously did.
Otherwise, the terms remain largely the same. TikTok states that it collects data provided by users, obtained through analysis or in the context of their behavior, including location, age, email, phone numbers, chat messages, metadata about any uploaded content, religious beliefs, mental or physical health diagnoses, sex life or sexual orientation, immigration status, and more. The company then uses this data to display ads, to “learn more about you,” to train its algorithm, and essentially for anything else for which it is legally permitted to use this data.
Opting out of TikTok data collection
If you prefer TikTok collects less of your personal data, you can go to the Settings and Privacy page in the app and opt out of “Targeted Ads Off-TikTok,” “Use Off-TikTok Activity for Ad Targeting,” disable location tracking, stop syncing contacts, and make other changes. You can also go to your phone’s Settings page, select TikTok, and change your location tracking permissions. Learn more about how and why you should change TikTok privacy settings here.
TikTok Censorship Accusations
In addition to vowing to remove the app over concerns about data collection, many TikTok users claim the platform censors or restricts politically charged posts, particularly videos related to the Alexa Pretty shooting. In the hashtag #TikTokCensorship on X, users report that Democratic Party videos on TikTok have lost millions of views , and the platform censors videos about Jeffrey Epstein and other topics.
It’s too early to say whether these messages are the result of changes to TikTok’s algorithm or a technical issue. TikTok issued a statement attributing the zero views and other performance issues to a “cascading system failure” caused by the power outage:
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Last month, TikTok’s new leadership promised to retrain the platform’s recommendation algorithm “based on US user data to ensure the content feed is free from external interference.” What exactly this “external interference” will look like in practice remains to be seen.