Why do you need this much data of users?
Chinese social media app, TikTok has notified users about its updated privacy policy in U.S, revealing that it will collect new types of biometric information including “facial recognition details and voiceprints” in the future.
The company hasn’t provided a valid explanation on why the app might need to access this information in the first place.
First spotted by TechCrunch, the privacy policy was updated on June 2nd and it sheds light on how the app has permission to analyze users’ content, just like that.
What’s new?
The policy states,
We may collect information about the images and audio that are a part of your User Content, such as identifying the objects and scenery that appear, the existence and location within an image of face and body features and attributes, the nature of the audio, and the text of the words spoken in your User Content. We may collect this information to enable special video effects, for content moderation, for demographic classification, for content and ad recommendations, and for other non-personally-identifying operations
While TikTok’s explanation to this new policy talks about moderation and user experience, the company needs to explain this in a more transparent way.
Tiktok is already notorious for handling privacy and security of its user data in a bad way. Receiving too much flak in terms of security and privacy is not stopping Tiktok doing these controversial activities.
The app is already banned in India since last year, citing “prejudicial to sovereignty and integrity of India, defence of India, security of state and public order” and lot of counties believe that it has ties with ruling Chinese government.
A Tiktok spokesperson didn’t provide any detailed response on this new privacy policy, but a general comment was given.
As part of our ongoing commitment to transparency, we recently updated our Privacy Policy to provide more clarity on the information we may collect
The new privacy policy is more explicit that the app can now collect biometric dataa,that is, the measurement of physical characteristics, including the aforementioned “face recognition details and voiceprints.”
The policy also states that TikTok will seek consent from users before collecting this information, but only when it is required to do so by the law.
While this policy is only pertaining to U.S, it needs to be seen in which all other countries TikTok will update the privacy policy in the same way.
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