should you actually delete the app?

More and more prominent Dutch people expressed their concerns about TikTok and China. Should we actually be using the app?

TikTok and China: what to do with it?

If it is up to the ChristenUnie, TikTok will be banned. Member of Parliament Don Ceder argues that children should be protected in this way now that TikTok has adjusted its privacy policy. There is a possibility that the Chinese government can view all user data.

TikTok rewrote its privacy policy in Europe in early November. “We allow certain employees access to TikTok user data,” the company writes. These employees (from China, among others) are only allowed to view the data if it is necessary to do their job and, according to the company, the employees are subject to “a series of strict security checks and approval protocols”. Of course that sounds a bit vague.

State Secretary Alexandra van Huffelen (Digitisation) has also indicated that she is concerned about the app and what happens to children’s data. Tiktok itself says that TikTok has never shared user data with the Chinese government and will not.

It’s all about the algorithm

But your data is not the only concern. At Jinek, Alexander Klöpping recently argued that TikTok should be banned throughout the European Union due to possible influence via the app. “How acceptable is it that our youth spend hours a day in it while we don’t know how the selections are made from the videos that are presented?” Klöpping said during the broadcast.

TikTok is no longer just a place to watch funny videos with animals and dances. Although most people still use the app for that, TikTok also consists largely of serious videos and news.

TikTok’s greatest strength is its algorithm. Every action you take in your app is registered and the videos you then see are adjusted accordingly. This does not only happen if you like a video, because TikTok also knows how long you watch a video, whether you share it, whether you read the comments, whether you react yourself, and so on.

If you use TikTok, that algorithm will soon become visible. If you watch videos with dogs for a long time, you will automatically see more videos with dogs. But how do we know that you are not being steered in a certain direction because someone in China is benefiting from it? For example, can’t the country use TikTok very easily and invisibly to influence elections?

Delete TikTok?

You are not alone if you have the app open for several hours a day. Millions of Dutch people use TikTok to watch and share videos, and get a lot of pleasure out of it. Is the above reason enough to ditch the entire app and deny yourself that pleasure? That seems a bit exaggerated indeed.

You could choose to use the app only to watch videos and not to make videos. As soon as you make images, you give the app much more information about yourself and your surroundings.

At the very least, more awareness about what happens behind the scenes at the app is not a luxury. Such as what the app knows about you and with whom it may be shared. It is also good to read up on how algorithms work and how they can also be abused.

In any case, the subject is alive and well in the House of Representatives, so there is a good chance that something will change in the near future. For example, that TikTok must adjust the privacy policy, or that there will be a real ban. The latter seems unlikely, but you never know.

Do you want to stay informed of developments? Sign up for our newsletter: