The popular short video sharing service TikTok stands reviewing its policy on the privacy for European users to explicitly clarify that some employees around the world, including China, can access user data.
In the sense that they access without consent? Not really: unfortunately many users (if not almost all) when they sign up for a platform do not read the various privacy disclaimers or famous terms of service, the moment you sign up (it doesn’t matter if Facebook, Instagram or TikTok) you accept these things for contract.
It’s not the first time TikTok has found itself at the center of a privacy scandal, however, there are a few things to say.
What’s new about the new TikTok privacy policy?
The platform owned by ByteDance, which currently stores European user data in the US and Singapore, said the review is part of its ongoing data mastery efforts to restrict employee access to users in the region, reduce minimize data flows outside of it and store information on local servers.
The updated privacy policy applies to users located in the UK, the European Economic Area (EEA) and Switzerland and will take effect on December 2, 2022, according to The Guardian.
“Based on a demonstrated need to do their jobs, subject to a set of robust security controls and approval protocols, and through methods recognized by the GDPR, we allow certain employees within our corporate group based in Brazil, Canada , China, Israel, Japan, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, South Korea and US remote access to European TikTok user data“, has affirmed the company.
It was also argued at the top of TikTok that its security controls consist of system access restrictions, encryption and network security, adding that it does not collect precise location information from its users in Europe (i.e. no tracking of geolocation, at least for theoretical ways).
The development also comes against the platform’s growing regulatory scrutiny on both sides of the Atlantic, which has over a billion monthly active users. ByteDance has repeatedly denied that it is controlled by the Chinese government.
In July 2022, there was discussion of a controversial update of the privacy policy in Europe which could have allowed TikTok to serve targeted ads based on user activity on the social video platform without their explicit consent.
The platform has also done good and bad weather in the United States, with Brendan Carr, a Republican member of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), who has requested the prohibition of the application for national security reasons that user data could be accessible by the Chinese authorities.
Last month, the company has disputed a Forbes report which claimed that a Chinese ByteDance team planned to use the platform to track the locations of selected US citizens without their knowledge or authorization.
So should we worry about all this?
In reality, the real question to ask would be another: did we do well to start the famous “era of social media” which began towards the end of the 2000s with MySpace first and Facebook (above all), then?
Because these kinds of privacy concerns are by no means new, and for better or worse they were well known since the early days of Facebook, which pioneered today’s social media.
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