According to Statista, nearly two billion people use Tiktok and according to Pew Research, a third of United States (U.S.) adults use TikTok, and 59% of young adults under 30 in the U.S. use the app.
“TikTok’s Chinese owner, ByteDance, agreed to spin out a U.S. TikTok entity. Under the complicated arrangement, non-Chinese investors will own about 80 percent of the American app. ByteDance will keep 19.9 percent of it,” according to the New York Times.
TikTok users in the U.S. should be made aware of the new and recent changes to the app, which are incredibly detrimental to their privacy.
The NY Times reported that “TikTok has changed its terms and conditions and privacy policies for American users, expanding its ability to target advertising and track the location of people who give the app permission to do so.”
It is critical to care about privacy between tech companies and users. Users should not have to fear for their safety when they just want to use a social media app for pure entertainment purposes.
When users logged on to the app in the past week, TikTok informed them that the terms and conditions were updated, but did not provide adequate information in the initial message. Users had to do research on their own time to fully understand the updates. TikTok presented users with the choice to accept or decline the new terms.
It’s extremely scary that an app can track my location. TikTok is an app used by children as well, which makes this all the more frightening and unsafe.
“The new version of the privacy policy says that if users enable location services, TikTok can now collect approximate or precise location information. People can opt out of this through their device settings. That kind of data tracking has become more common across social media, said Caitriona Fitzgerald, a policy director at the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a Washington-based nonprofit,” as stated by the New York Times.
This update to the privacy policy that TikTok just incorporated is deeply concerning. Even if it is seen as a practice that a lot of social media apps may use today, that is not an excuse. Everyone should be worried about their safety immediately upon agreeing to the updated terms.
The fact that a social media platform can track the precise location of an individual seems quite unnecessary and is something that can cause more harm than good. This is alarming because of the power it gives TikTok, and it makes me not want to use the app anymore at all.
The Substack Post reports, “After a long and contentious battle, ownership of TikTok has officially changed hands in the U.S. and is now overseen by a consortium of American investors rather than the Chinese Communist Party. In just a matter of days, censorship on the platform seems more prevalent than ever, with users reporting account suppressions and the throttling of political posts.”
“The new CEO of TikTok is promoting an expansive definition of hate speech; he recently declared, ‘There is no finish line to moderating hate speech,” according to The Substack Post.
I am in full support of protecting everyone from online harm, but censorship should not silence the good. With that, the new TikTok guidelines are definitely something all users in the United States should be made aware of to protect their rights and their safety.
Ali Barretta can be contacted at
