Don't Use TikTok
Why high-profile individuals, their families, and, well, everyone should not use TikTok.
I'll spoil the conclusion in one sentence. An account on TikTok is inadvisable for privacy-oriented high-profile individuals (e.g., non-influencers) and their families.
I regularly have high-profile clients that ask whether TikTok is safe, or if they should be using it. In fact, I have had more than one client set-up secret TikTok accounts to feed their addiction to the platform. This is bad, bad news.
First, let's start with the basics. TikTok is owned by a Chinese company, ByteDance, and as such has been under fire for being a national security threat due to potential unsafe data tracking and sharing with the Chinese government. It is currently banned in India for this exact reason.
A recent report in Forbes stated that "... TikTok's parent company, ByteDance, planned to use the TikTok app to monitor the personal location of some specific American citizens."
Let's read that again: specific U.S. citizens. The piece doesn't go into what citizens were under consideration for targeting, but we can all guess. Celebrities, CEOs, journalists, and politicians have all had instances where their location needed to be secret for financial, national security, or personal safety reasons. Willingly using location data to target U.S. citizens at any given time could have disastrous results.
Unfortunately, this sort of news isn't unique. Unsavory data collection is a common thread for TikTok.
Buzzfeed uncovered in June of this year that employees, and presumably government actors, repeatedly access U.S. user data from China. From the piece: "'I feel like with these tools, there's some backdoor to access user data in almost all of them,' said an external auditor hired to help TikTok close off Chinese access to sensitive information, like Americans' birthdays and phone numbers."
FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr stated in June, "The CCP has a track record longer than a CVS receipt of conducting business & industrial espionage as well as other actions contrary to U.S. national security, which is what makes it so troubling that personnel in Beijing are accessing this sensitive and personnel data."
And in 2019, TikTok was fined $5.7 million by the FTC for illegally collecting information from children under the age of 13 without obtaining parental consent.
This continued abuse of privacy puts anyone at risk but can be particularly harmful to high-profile individuals (and their loved ones) whose personal information has more value than the typical user that just likes silly videos overlaid with music.
For executives seeking to protect their personal and professional information, I advise steering clear of TikTok altogether. It is better to invest your time and energy elsewhere.
Bottom line: Stay away from TikTok as an executive. Protect yourself and your loved ones by avoiding this unsafe platform.