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TikTok keeps a list of everything its users watch and do. It keeps a list of users who watch videos about tattoos. It keeps a list of users who watch videos about wearing dresses. How would it know to recommend you more gay stuff if it doesn't know you like gay stuff? TikTok is a spyware company. Always has been. "They include gay people in their spying!" is not news.
I'd imagine any social network keeps tracks of what categories its user's prefer.
TikTok keeps a list of everything its users watch and do. It keeps a list of users who watch videos about tattoos. It keeps a list of users who watch videos about wearing dresses. How would it know to recommend you more gay stuff if it doesn't know you like gay stuff? TikTok is a spyware company. Always has been. "They include gay people in their spying!" is not news.
It doesn’t sounds like it was run of the mill data logging. I don’t think they had explicit lists of people who watch videos of tattoos?
> A TikTok representative told the Wall Street Journal that the data set was accessible on the dashboard to authorised employees only and that the dashboard was deleted in the US almost a year ago.
That said, the fact that even a database view exists is a problem. The threat is real-- it's the same reason the Chinese were interested in buying Grindr.
TikTok keeps a list of everything its users watch and do. It keeps a list of users who watch videos about tattoos. It keeps a list of users who watch videos about wearing dresses. How would it know to recommend you more gay stuff if it doesn't know you like gay stuff? TikTok is a spyware company. Always has been. "They include gay people in their spying!" is not news.
A lot of comments here seem to be hyper focused on the inherent properties of a social network necessary to serve users relevant content. As a tech community, we’re better equipped to understand this inherent property, but arguably the average user won’t have the same intuitions.
There are two ways I think this can be read:
1) TikTok does what every social media platform does, but because of the cultural context, articles like this seek to warn users that their preferences are now on a list somewhere. In this case, it’s not that the existence of a list is surprising, but that who holds the list is worrisome.
2) Above and beyond the base functions of a social network, TikTok specifically maintains topic-specific reports for . If this is indeed true, it just magnifies the concern, because now it’s not just about “TikTok could do this”, but “TikTok is doing this”.
In other words, it’s one thing to have data about users as a natural byproduct of running the network. It’s another thing to build highly sensitive reports on that data, and depending on who builds those reports and why, questions will naturally arise.
What’s not clear from the article is which thing is happening.
> “TikTok does not identify individuals or infer sensitive information such as sexual orientation or race based on what they watch.”
If they’re going to do something nefarious with this kind of data, it’s not necessary to infer orientation or race. This is a non-answer.
TikTok keeps a list of everything its users watch and do. It keeps a list of users who watch videos about tattoos. It keeps a list of users who watch videos about wearing dresses. How would it know to recommend you more gay stuff if it doesn't know you like gay stuff? TikTok is a spyware company. Always has been. "They include gay people in their spying!" is not news.
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That word does not mean what you think it means
TikTok keeps a list of everything its users watch and do. It keeps a list of users who watch videos about tattoos. It keeps a list of users who watch videos about wearing dresses. How would it know to recommend you more gay stuff if it doesn't know you like gay stuff? TikTok is a spyware company. Always has been. "They include gay people in their spying!" is not news.
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