Developed in 2016 for the Chinese market by Chinese company ByteDance, whose original name is Douyin, the video-sharing and social networking mobile application became TikTok in markets outside of China the following year.
Hugely popular with young and old around the world, ByteDance is increasing its acquisitions (Musical.ly, News Republic) to reach a market value of more than $100 billion in May 2020, according to Bloomberg.
With big money at stake, TikTok eats and grinds your personal data for advertising purposes to generate — you guessed it — billions in profits thanks to its pool of more than a billion subscribers. This way you will get to know the company much better than you can imagine.
Those famous algorithms
We owe the meteoric rise of TikTok, those famous interactive programs aimed at predicting what users will like and providing you with more personalized content, to the algorithms that manage the recommendation system.
What makes TikTok better than other platforms (Facebook, Twitter, etc.) is that it even captures our passive and subtle behavioral patterns to teach its algorithms about us in real-time as followers consume videos.
…to make you passive
These computer models calculate how many times we loop a video, how fast we scroll through certain content, and whether we’re drawn to a certain category of effects and sounds. This hyper-responsive recommendation system allows TikTok users to remain completely passive if they wish, while arriving at a personalized and engaging content feed much faster than other platforms.
How does TikTok get to know you?
Subscriber or not, TikTok collects information through cookies and other tracers. With an account, the platform collects data about your activities and preferences based on the videos you watch.
TikTok knows the type of device you use, your IP address, your search history, the content of your messages, what you watch and for how long. In addition, your device identifiers are used to track your interactions with advertisers.
In addition, the network is able to derive information such as your age group, gender and interests from the information it has about you. In the United States, TikTok may also collect biometric information, including facial and voiceprints.
All of this data is expensive. So if someone watches a video to the end and likes it, TikTok can serve personalized ads based on that. Capturing that feeling with this level of precision is harder on other platforms.
When you register, TikTok receives your email address, phone number, date of birth and the content you have created and the metadata associated with it. If you log in to Facebook, the information can also be shared with the social network.
TikTok’s privacy policy goes so far as to include text, images, and videos from your clipboard when you copy and paste content to or from the app or share it with a third-party platform.
While this policy is clear, it remains vague in relation to data sharing with the UK and Ireland joint controllers, as well as sharing with the other divisions of the group of companies.
All this data is used to feed the algorithms and filters, but is also used for profiling and behavioral targeting.
Since the app requests access to your smartphone’s microphone and camera, privacy permissions also allow TikTok to secure detailed information about your GPS location and other apps you run. These privacy permissions can be accepted or denied, but disabling them may limit TikTok’s functionality.
Stop collecting your data
While this may limit TikTok’s functionality, there are several settings worth checking out. To turn personalized ads on or off, go to Me and select… to open your settings. Then go to Privacy, Security, Personalize and Data and turn the feature off.
To request your data and see what TikTok knows about you, go to Profile and tap the three dots (…) to open your settings. Go to Privacy, Customize and Data, Download TikTok Data.
TikTok lets you set your account private so only people you approve can follow you. However, this affects functionality, warns TikTok. With a private account, other users cannot duet, merge, or download your videos. You can limit the audience for your videos in TikTok’s privacy settings. Or to make your account private, go to Me, tap the three dots (…), Privacy, Turn on personal account.
A private account protects you from sharing information with other people instead of with TikTok itself.
Another “divide and conquer” action, don’t link your account to other platforms like Facebook and Google. It just multiplies your data on other networks.
If you have an iPhone, you can also use Apple’s App Tracking Transparency feature to limit TikTok’s ability to track your activity.
Use a “disposable” email address with a different name for your TikTok account and an encrypted VPN connection to hide your location.
Or the “nuclear” method: close or not have a TikTok account.