They’re hiding disturbing abuses of power, ignoring their own community guidelines, and offering personal information to third parties and the Chinese government. Tik Tok is leaving many users in the dark about the company’s policies, past, and practices, by deliberately making information difficult to access and navigate. Cody Ko’s story exemplifies Tik Tok’s unchecked and alarming authority, Ko noted people should be more careful using the app going forward. Ko pointed out that what Tik Tok is doing is technically legal as they reserve the right to basically adapt and use anything you make on the app for promotions, as well to give said content to third parties for similar reasons. Tik Tok then took his private Tik Toks and repurposed them his for promotional reasons. This means that the company had to deliberately access his account, as it would be against YouTube’s terms of service for Tik Tok to take Ko’s photo from his video, and use it in an ad. In response to the use of his face in ads, Ko posted a video on October 30th titled, “Tik Tok is trolling me”, wherein he explained that his account and videos were completely private. After this video was posted, many fans of his started to notice that clips of him were being used in ads on Facebook. Ko posted a video where he recreated different six second Tik Toks videos for his 1.6 million subscribers on YouTube.
However, Tik Tok’s company is under close surveillance by the Chinese was bought by Tik Tok’s parent company, Bytedance, in 2017. The fact that the two apps share a parent company means that both companies have been incredibly quiet about government interference, and the fact that they store and process user data in, “United States of America, Singapore, Japan or to China.” This data vulnerability is deeply worrisome and should ward off users of the app.Ĭomedian, actor, and YouTuber Cody Ko posted a video to YouTube on October 17th, trying out the Tik Tok app, but what followed for him sheds a sliver of light onto Tik Tok’s capabilities as a company and their access to private information. Typically, companies are wary to store data in China because storing data there gives the government exceptionally easy data mining capabilities. China’s censorship is one of the most extensive ones in the world. When the app came back: it contained new age restrictions and censorship policies. In July of 2018, China’s government took Tik Tok off the internet completely. SCMP had “not received any feedback or seen the accounts terminated” a week later. Tik Tok claimed that they worked to remove underaged children from the app, but after this investigation The South China Morning Post (SCMP) used the app’s flagging feature and reported three children users. This was concerning because at the time in Hong Kong, Tik Tok was not to be used by anyone under 16 years of age. A great deal of the information stolen was from elementary school children. In May of 2018, an investigation found that there were almost no privacy features on the app, allowing users’ personal information to be stolen. Tik Tok as a company is riddled with data scandals. Tik Tok claims to care about the safety of children but is very blatantly aware of their presence on the app.įurthermore, the terms of service and privacy policy go for pages and pages, with tabs, links, and other ways of making the restrictions difficult to fully follow and comprehend, especially for the everyday user. The app is also marketed towards kids and marks the app as “12+” in the app store. However, the app uses what appear to be minors in advertisements, transferred minors’ profiles from Musical.ly, and clearly allows minors on to their trending page. One of the most concerning aspects of the terms of service is that it bars anyone under the age of 18 from utilizing the platform. Arbitration prohibits filing lawsuits and class actions- meaning that nobody can sue as a collective group, results are binding, and no appeal is possible, regardless of crimes committed by or on the app. After speaking with a lawyer, and showing them the contents of Tik Tok’s privacy policy and terms of service, it appears that the app contains contradictory language, inconsistent application, unintelligible onerous provisions, and i t mandates arbitration.
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