At first glance, Tik Tok seems like an innocent thing: an app loved by kids and teenagers, designed to create and share short, fun videos.
However, it has become very controversial. India has already banned it. Other countries, including the US and Australia, are reportedly considering a ban. In the UK, TikTok is under investigation by the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) for alleged misuse of children’s data.
US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who is currently disregarding talks. In May this year, the Dutch announced that they would launch an investigation into whether the company adequately protects children’s data under both domestic law and the EU-backed GDPR.
Recently, however, the company has taken some steps to defuse allegations of bad faith by seeking to discourage use by children under the age of 13 from registering and imposing some form of parental control.
So should we give TikTok the benefit of the doubt?
Collecting data from children without permission
In 2019, TikTok was fined a record $5.7 million by the US Federal Trade Commission for violating US laws by collecting data on children under the age of 13 without parental consent.
To be fair, the fine related to TikTok’s previous incarnation as Musical.ly (also a Chinese-owned app) before the two companies merged and effectively took over TikTok.
Perhaps even more worryingly, just this month South Korean authorities fined TikTok £123,000 for illegally collecting data on children under the age of 14 without their parents’ permission.
direct
However, it is not clear when the whistleblowers worked on the site. At the end of April this year, TikTok stopped receiving direct messages for under-16s.
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Still, the Children’s Charities’ Coalition on Internet Safety has called for TikTok to be banned from the UK until it can prove it’s safe for children.
It’s Chinese
TikTok is embroiled in the China-UK-US war of words. How you feel about whether it’s unsafe depends in part on whether you think the undisputed human rights abuses in China (by Uyghurs and Hong Kong democracy activists) extend to everything China touches. And whether, as it claims, TikTok is separate from the Chinese state.
To be on the safe side, there are several issues to worry about:
Data collection (again)
TikTok claims that data about its users is stored in Singapore, the US and elsewhere in the world, but not in China. It insists it is not an arm of the Chinese state. But there are reasonable grounds to believe that ByteDance, TikTok’s parent company, might have a very hard time resisting if China wants access to the data.
This may seem like a distant concern to British parents now – but if your child becomes, say, a democracy activist a decade from now, they might not want the Chinese state to know everything about them.
censorship
Documents leaked to the Guardian last year showed that TikTok had censored political speech, including videos mentioning Tiananmen Square or Tibetan independence. The company claims the instructions disclosed in those documents have since been retracted. However, the fear remains that an app that originated in a system that controls the flow of information will censor dissent where it finds it politically uncomfortable.
page for you
TikTok’s For You page is a curated video feed. Users never have to click away from it. The algorithm that determines this, like curation algorithms on other platforms, is a closely guarded secret.
Curation on social media sites has been blamed for many things, including the rise of anti-vaccination and the current fragility of democracy. It’s not just Chinese companies that are channeling or restricting information. But there are fears that TikTok’s curation will just make anything politically uncomfortable disappear.
What is TikT doing downloading videos blocked.
It’s all a step in the right direction – although, as always, one could argue that putting all the responsibility on the parents takes the burden off the company itself.
