TikTok tracked who viewed LGBT content, says newspaper – 05/05/2023 – Tech

TikTok identified users who watched LGBT-friendly content on the app for at least a year, according to a report published by the Wall Street Journal on Friday (5).

Former employees of the company said that information related to videos of this theme could be viewed on a panel, which displayed the set of users who watched them and their respective identification numbers.

TikTok employees in the US, UK and Australia raised concerns about this practice with senior executives, saying they feared that employees could share the data with third parties or that it could be used to blackmail users themselves, according to the publication.

Collecting information about user behavior is common among technology companies to personalize the user experience and deliver targeted advertising. However, tracking based on sensitive data, such as sexual orientation, religion, race, among others, can be considered invasive and can lead to discriminatory practices.

In Brazil, for example, the LGPD (General Data Protection Law), distinguishes the processing of personal data (such as name, email, consumption habits) from sensitive data, which require greater care. TikTok does not ask users to reveal their sexual orientation to register, a common practice on the internet.

A TikTok spokeswoman told the Wall Street Journal that the dashboard employees used to access gay content consumers’ data was removed in the US nearly a year ago.

The spokeswoman also stated that the company does not identify potentially sensitive information, such as sexual orientation or race, based on what users watch. The data represents the interests of users and is not necessarily a sign of someone’s identity, she said.

Internally, some TikTok employees still argued that the data collection was safe, because it did not indicate whether users actually belonged to a certain group, according to the newspaper.

Other employees disagreed, saying that the subject matter of the videos a user watched is enough to infer aspects of their identity, particularly for topics like sexuality, according to some former employees. These employees described the data as a list of gay TikTok users.

The revelation comes amid an offensive by the United States against the application. The US government has two major suspicions about the social network. The first is that it is used by the Chinese regime to spy on American citizens. Like other apps like Facebook and Instagram, TikTok collects all sorts of data from its users and uses that information to feed its algorithms. The difference is that ByteDance, which owns the app, is a Chinese company and therefore would be subject to a national security law that requires it to pass data to the regime if required.

The second suspicion is that TikTok’s video recommendation algorithm, known for its ability to retain users in an eternal loop, also has advertising purposes, influencing public opinion by promoting or suppressing strategic posts.