With the change in TikTok ownership, TikTok users in the U.S. are collectively freaking out over the company’s updated privacy policy after being alerted to the changes through an in-app message.
The revised document details the U.S. joint venture’s conditions for using its service, including the specific location information it may collect.
Many users are also posting to social media about language found in the policy, which says that TikTok could collect sensitive information about its users, including their “sexual life or sexual orientation, status as transgender or nonbinary, citizenship or immigration status.”
There’s also a matter of small businesses and artists that despite what people here might think need platforms like this because regular people are too fucking stupid to go to a website.
Or I guess we could all just fucking starve to death and you could all just go shopping at Walmart.
I’m sorry but I don’t believe that privacy violations and massive online tracking is the only solution to that. There are other platforms that don’t track nearly as much, and emerging decentralized platforms where one could build a similar following if that platform got the same kind of mainstream usage. This is not a faustian deal anyone needs to make.