should you worry about that?

• Nando Kastelein

  Tech publisher

Today, the popular app TikTok is making a major change to its privacy policy. This allows Chinese employees, among others, access to data from European users. Lawyers tell NOS that this violates European privacy rules. Answers to five questions about the meaning of these new rules.

TikTok’s rules stipulate for the first time that employees outside the EU can access European user data. It affects employees from eleven countries. One such country is China, home to TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance.

It has long been feared that the Chinese government could obtain sensitive data from European citizens in this way. According to TikTok, this is “restricted remote access”.

This is not clear. TikTok won’t say despite repeated requests for NOS. The privacy policy itself refers to just another chapter of the same privacy policy, detailing what data the company collects.

This concerns, for example, the information you share yourself: the videos you post, as well as comments or private conversations. Your behavior is also closely monitored. Think about what videos you watch, how often you watch something, whether or not you reply to someone.

“TikTok’s goals are very broad, so that employees can actually do anything with data,” says Mathieu Paapst, assistant professor of IT and privacy law at the University of Groningen. “Also: What is the need for employees of an office in China to be able to do all this? You can put serious question marks on this.”

It also takes into account that employees in China have had access for some time and that the company is trying to legitimize it in this way. “In that sense, it’s sort of a fixer’s hack. If they didn’t have access before, it begs the question of where the need to be able to suddenly come from.”

It’s not always easy to say how China could abuse it, says Pieter Wolters, an associate professor of civil law at Radboud University. “It is therefore entirely possible that data that at first seem innocent will later turn out to be of great importance.”

According to Wolters, this can be used to further refine Chinese propaganda towards the West or to build profiles of people, for example by combining data with other sources. “Use for propaganda also demonstrates that data sharing can also pose a risk to society as a whole, even if the risk to individual users is limited.”

Because TikTok records everything you do, the business can build a great picture of who you are. And find out what your political preferences or sexual orientation are. It is true that the risks will be greater for one than for the other.

China can also use your behavior as a tool for blackmail. “Imagine: You’re a politician from a conservative Christian party and you like videos with scantily clad women on TikTok,” Wolters says. “If you then criticize China, the government can confront him with his behavior and ask him to be less critical.”

According to TikTok, this is necessary to ensure that “the TikTok experience is fun and safe.” The company says the information may be needed for “important functions” such as data storage, security, research, analytics, online payments and content moderation, for example.

The company doesn’t want to say how many employees have this access, but says it is “continually” limiting the scope of access.

Yes of course. Privacy concerns in social media are older than TikTok itself. TikTok is therefore by no means the only social media platform that you as a user should critically follow, say the experts NOS spoke to. But also Instagram, Facebook or Twitter.

“The fact that TikTok is so vague isn’t great,” says Radboud University’s Wolters. “Most tech companies word their privacy statements vaguely.” But America – where many other social media outlets come from – is a very different country from China, where human rights are under great pressure.