TikTok debate: Why data privacy matters
This is the Our View, prepared by the Editorial Board and the institutional voice of The Record
On Monday, U.S. officials reached a preliminary framework agreement with China to move the popular social media app TikTok under U.S. control. Negotiations were led on behalf of the United States by Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer, while Vice Premier for Economic Policy, He Lifeng led negotiations on China’s behalf.
President Trump set a deadline for mid-December to either enforce or delay a law requiring Tik-Tok to separate from its Chinese parent company or face a ban in the United States The law has now been delayed four times, and concrete details on the deal are speculated to be released.
Sprout Social reported in a poll that 82% of Gen Z is on TikTok, making it one of the generation’s most significant platforms. The same survey found that TikTok is the most popular social media platform for product discovery and news/events, beating out Instagram and Facebook. For Gen Z, TikTok goes beyond just doom scrolling or funny videos – it’s a platform that influences spending habits and informs how individuals stay up to date on current events.
In 2024, Congress passed bipartisan legislation to ban TikTok in the United States unless a non-Chinese parent owner takes control, due to the belief that TikTok is a national security threat to the United States under Chinese ownership given their track record with handling user data.
Security researchers found in 2020 that TikTok read sensitive iOS clipboard data without consent, one of many key privacy issues that TikTok claimed to remedy. While there is evidence that suggests that TikTok relies heavily on third-party trackers rather than other platforms like Meta (the parent company of Instagram and Facebook), which also collects data to leabout your location, app usage, device type, personal identifiers and much more in the name of app functionality and curating targeted advertisements.
Clearly, no social media platform is safe from ongoing accusations of data privacy violations: Meta faced a massive lawsuit in 2018 when a whistleblower revealed that British consulting firm Cambridge Analytica used the data of nearly 87 million Facebook accounts to create voter profiles for political advertisements without permission. In 2021, NPR reported that over 530 million Facebook users again had their personal data harvested in a breach that released the information on a public forum.
Still, Meta is an American-owned company, and ByteDance, who operates TikTok, is not. Much of the scrutiny surrounding TikTok’s privacy issues in particular stem from the fact that Americans are concerned about their data landing in the hands of China, alongside the existing third-party privacy concerns.
When a platform this popular comes under fire for claims of national security breaches, how much does Gen Z really care? One TikTok influencer gave an interview to The Guardian in 2020 stating that she was nonplussed about the data privacy concerns that came with using TikTok, because she thought every other social media platform was doing the same thing in collecting her data and figured it was the “price to pay” for a presence on the internet. Perhaps this unfazed attitude speaks to the reason why many users aren’t concerned about data mining on TikTok – they think every other platform is doing the same thing. But does this opinion still hold true after five years of TikTok privacy debates?
While there are certainly many members of Gen Z who take the data privacy issue seriously, the platform’s engagement doesn’t appear to be slowing down despite the controversy: they reported 1.6 billion active users globally earlier this year, demonstrating significant year-over-year growth.
Gen Z is often conditioned not to care about privacy, prioritizing entertainment over security, pirating movies, pay-per-view events, and freely giving information away to apps without a second thought. In general, we believe the public should take more precautions and acknowledge what personal information they are giving up while accessing sources such as TikTok. Being more intentional about safeguarding your privacy could include staying up to date on privacy policies, trying a reliable VPN, using two-factor authentication across apps and changing your password on a consistent basis.
No matter what you choose, it’s worth thinking twice about how much of your personal data is out there and where there are gaps in your internet security – you might actually read through the terms and conditions next time.