The creepy algorithm behind the most popular platform for short-term video content keeps raising both questions and concerns, and this happens years after the audience made peace with the fact that the app is designed to hook and keep them glued to their screens for as long as possible. TikTok shows you precisely what you would do and where you would go, assuming you were not wired to the same destination that unearths your deepest desires and goals.
TikTok had to create a privacy policy just as inclusive as the follower categories it is serving, which asked for extra precision given that over 1,5BN people use the app. This ubiquitous destination for image, stitch, in-feed, or slideshow videos exhibits a few of our times’ most colossal tech trends, so it has garnered dangerously large amounts of data and details about its users. To begin with, Sensitive and valuable data needs to be protected at all costs to keep internauts safe.
Evidently and unfortunately, TikTok itself can be a revenue stream for hackers and attackers targeting online user data. As experts from www.databreachclaims.org.uk explain, social media profiles like those created on TikTok can be easily exposable and compromised. There’s no such thing as “too much precaution” when it comes to widespread, gigantic platforms like TikTok that work as magnets for malicious cybersecurity assailants. As you’ll get to see, it’s just as easy to safeguard your identity and integrity in the face of online threats as it is to personalize that mysterious algorithm, so let’s see what such achievement requires.
Start with the basics
TikTok’s privacy policy hosts myriad details about its astronomical data collections, meaning that extra protective measures must be taken by you in order to boost your security in such a hyped online realm. Experts recommend employing all the safe tips you’d use on any other largely used platform, such as using hard-to-break passwords, avoiding using the password on other websites, removing or blocking users that upset you, turning off the feature that suggests your account to others, and downloading reliable mobile antivirus. Avoid clicking on suspicious, shady, fishy links or URLs coming from untrustworthy accounts.
What ranks as one of the most widespread social networks worldwide makes a different case in terms of security. Newcomers break into TikTok monthly, while considerably fewer leave this addictive space once and forever. These enormous adoption waves mirror a rising demand for the platform’s presence and pressure for it to always come up with new offerings.
TikTok’s prominence can spell trouble
As long as there’s demand, TikTok will keep advancing and speeding up new tech services, including those based on generative artificial intelligence (genAI) that’s been making all the headlines for the past years. Fresh demand opens room for new challenges and new risks. For those failing to keep up with the latest releases in terms of technology, this innovative platform has once again taken the world by surprise with a revolutionary feature, the StreamVoice.
The new and highly controversial voice-copying tool is making a lot of noise and for good reasons. First, it can take a sample of an individual’s voice and replicate it for a longer piece of vocal audio in the name of another person, enabling those with modest tech skill levels to imitate virtually any voice they want. Second, such offerings are just as promising as they’re easy to use. It doesn’t take a master’s degree to carry out a malicious undertaking with them, but just enough to get the plan done without threatening the initiator’s identity or safety.
Such advances bring both good and bad fortune, and it’s only up to any user or business to choose the level of exposure they’re comfortable with in the modern, AI-driven world.
Follow the app’s primary safety tips
As with any other revered social media platform that respects its image and users, bigwig TikTok had to provide cybersecurity buffs or newbies in the tech world with some easily followable and implementable tips for the main layer of security. For what the platform can do, experts suggest users start their journey by never forgetting that their information remains visible to others regardless of the features and settings they activate or deactivate. For instance, even if your account is private, profile data such as your bio, username, and photo remain visible.
While it’s excellent to keep as many personal things away from your bio and other account sections, it’s also smart to employ misleading ways of expressing yourself when you’re required to, such as:
• Using song lyrics or quotes
• Naming your sports or hobbies
• Including emojis or hashtags instead of phrases
• Giving some weird and useless details, such as a weird coffee remake you’ve detested.
Extra feats for your peace of mind
Generally, any potential incommoding thought has to be treated accordingly. If you don’t want high school pals or relatives to come across you on TikTok, why should you avoid using the app or resign to having your account findable?
This isn’t a “do-or-die” situation. TikTok allows users to hide their content and accounts from selected categories or usernames. Similarly, it allows you to block someone’s page or content. In the app’s settings, you may even deactivate privacy features like those permitting others to download your content or allowing strangers to hit you up.
When searching for as much privacy as possible, consider making your account private and requesting approval for every submission of following, friendship, or content visualization from strangers. You can choose who you’ll interact with and who can stumble upon your account, given the app’s user safety-oriented policy and development.
Family pairing for teens and youngsters
We all have a younger person who has just entered the palpitating realm of TikTok or is about to break into it. Whether they’re your little cousin or your best friend’s younger sibling, the key to keeping them protected is never to restrict their access to such widespread platforms, nor to portray them negatively. Hopefully, the teenager will succeed in reaping all the educational, skilling, and cultural advantages such apps provide while exposing themselves as little as possible.
Family pairing is an app-provided feature that closes the gap between the two camps parents are split between. This setting establishes the type, frequency, and category of content they get exposed to, limiting their interactions with others and providing all the main online security tools one may look for.
As you can see, the answer to staying safe on the giant TikTok platform is not to avoid it but to implement the easy and effective tips enumerated above and others that you feel are working for you.
