TikTok has its own version of “People you may know.” Typically, when the app recommends someone’s account, it tells you what it’s basing the suggestion on.
“I don’t think anyone expects this kind of information to get passed along just based on a link.” “What I think is disturbing about it is how nonintuitive it is,” says Kashmir Hill, a technology and privacy reporter at The New York Times. Another user said they embedded a TikTok clip in a public blog post, and the app showed them the strangers that saw it. Suddenly, Waters started receiving notifications about which of the friend’s coworkers had watched it. Waters says he sent a TikTok video to a friend a few weeks ago, who then shared the same link in her office’s Slack workspace. Several TikTok users say the link feature caught them off guard, especially since other mainstream social media apps don’t work the same way. TikTok’s Privacy Policy notes that if you use third-party services like Twitter or Facebook to “share information about your usage on the Platform with others, these third-party services may be able to collect information about you, including your activity on the Platform.” It also notes that “depending on the permissions you grant, the third party may be able to obtain your account information.” Media companies often use similar technology to detect, for example, how many readers clicked on a story in a newsletter, but the technique typically doesn’t identify each person individually.
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But tests indicate that TikTok automatically embeds a unique code associated with your account into the URL when you share a link outside the app. It’s not clear exactly how the setting works, and TikTok declined to clarify. “Often these notifications are the only way I know they even have a TikTok account and what their username is.”
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“Now when I share videos with people, I often get a notification telling me they've watched the video I've shared,” Eugene Wei, a former tech executive who previously published a series of viral essays about TikTok, wrote on his blog last month. “The safety and privacy of our community is paramount, which is why we provide a range of privacy settings and opt-in features that empower people to customize their app experience to their own comfort and enjoyment,” a spokesperson for TikTok said in a statement. It’s also become a common complaint among the TikTok faithful more broadly, raising privacy concerns about the tactics the app uses to establish who they know in the first place. Eight TikTok users told WIRED that, over the past few months, the app has begun encouraging them to follow people from real life. While TikTok to date has been an app where you could largely expect never to run into annoying uncles, ex-boyfriends, or coworkers, the platform is now making a greater effort to connect users to people they already have relationships with outside the platform. But recently, it appears that’s started to change. Its stated mission is to “inspire creativity and build joy,” a far cry from Facebook’s goal to “bring the world closer together.” The app’s central feature, the For You Page algorithm, primarily recommends videos based on what users like, not whether they were uploaded by someone they know. Unlike other social apps, TikTok didn’t become a global success by connecting people with their friends and family.