The TikTok privacy debate did not end with the US agreement. It has escalated. TikTok has updated its US Privacy Policy. It is now one of the most aggressive data collection regimes of any mainstream… | Clara Hawking | 164 comments
The TikTok privacy debate did not end with the US agreement. It has escalated. TikTok has updated its US Privacy Policy. It is now one of the most aggressive data collection regimes of any mainstream consumer platform.
It explicitly acknowledges the collection and processing of sensitive personal information under US state privacy laws. Named directly:
• Racial or ethnic origin.
• Religious or philosophical beliefs.
• Mental and physical health data.
• Sexual orientation.
• Transgender or nonbinary status.
• Citizenship or immigration status.
• Precise location data.
The policy goes further.
TikTok is collecting far more than what users consciously share.
Under the updated policy, it gathers what you provide, what it observes automatically, and what it receives from third parties. That includes account details and identity verification documents, private messages, drafts and unpublished content, AI prompts and interactions, clipboard content, purchase and payment data, contact lists and social graphs, and an extensive set of technical signals such as device identifiers, keystroke patterns, battery state, audio configurations, and activity tracked across devices.
This is not incidental data leakage. It is formalized, permitted, and documented.
Images and video are treated as analyzable environments. TikTok states that it "identifies objects and scenery, detects faces and other body parts, extracts spoken words, and collects metadata describing how, when, where, and by whom content was created."
Post a photo near the Golden Gate Bridge and you are not just sharing a moment. You are generating structured data about place, time, environment, and your body, or body parts.
Photos and videos are not just content. They are raw material for computer vision, biometric analysis, and location inference.
Tik Tok will use all of the collected data, and maintains the right to sell all of it to interested third parties, from vendors to the federal government.
Leaders must act on this immdiately. Privacy policies are not background reading. They are power documents. When they change, accountability shifts with them.
If you are a user, a parent, a school, a youth facing organization, nonprofits, and public institutions that use TikTok as a communications channel, the update changes the governance calculus.
Engagement is not a neutral act. It carries serious legal and ethical obligations tied to data protection, duty of care, and institutional risk.
The new policy deserves close reading. At this stage of platform power, and scale of data collection, policy literacy is a governance responsibility, not a personal preference.
Read the policy here: https://lnkd.in/ejbm8THx | 164 comments on LinkedIn
