TikTok: What is surveillance today?

If you’re like me (or not), you’ve probably used TikTok. The addictive social media app is appealing, especially to Gen Z. There are a variety of reasons why — content creation is easier and more accessible than ever before, videos cover all sorts of topics (from politics to nature to music to frogs) and it’s all user friendly. However, there is one fundamental reason that TikTok grasps our attention: the calculated algorithm that picks up on users’ interests.

The algorithm has powerful categorization techniques for the astronomical number of videos that get uploaded every day. By sorting various trends, creators, likes and comments, the algorithm can then look at how much time you spend watching certain kinds of videos. Then, it will simply feed you more and more of these videos. 

This results in some pros and cons. 

The pros are that in America’s consumer-oriented culture, this app provides an infinite amount of fun (just keep scrolling!). It’s hard to get bored of TikTok — well, until you start to get a headache or you have to get up and interact with the real world. You can also find some niche corners of TikTok in which to interact with creators that are doing something relevant to your life. An instance of this is when, for the periods of time I was away from home and missed my cat, I indulged in cat TikTok — the small furballs kept me entertained for hours.

The cons are that the app is detrimental to our attention span and it can drive us into some dangerous rabbit holes. This creates echo chambers and polarization among the masses. In a sense, the more videos you see that reaffirm your beliefs, the more likely you are to perceive these videos as representative of reality (which is often not the case).

So, if an algorithm is so impactful, so fruitful, so targeted, should we be afraid of it?

Well, substantial claims from government officials have been made about TikTok’s threat to national security. Some claims go so far as to say that this Chinese company (and, subsequently, the Chinese government) can collect data from the American masses, posing a threat to American consumer privacy. This data includes (but is not limited to) what pages users spend more time on, browser tracking and history and ad preferences.

However, I don’t really think that the problem lies with security against potential foreign actors. We should expect that TikTok, like other tech giants, collects this information in an impersonal and algorithmic manner. Failing to rid us of this assumption, the U.S. government has been tight-lipped when asked to back up its claims of a conspiracy. TikTok’s data is collected and distributed to private companies; the app then feeds its users these personalized ads based on the content they’ve shown interest in. For example, say you’ve been watching a lot of music beat-making TikTok videos. Soon enough, you might come across online courses that teach users how to use beat-making software.

In that way, TikTok and other major social media apps can derive a digital copy of you: what you like, what you dislike, who you follow, how you interact, etc. Thus, the user is reduced to a collection of profitable potential and subsequently sold as a product. Identities are blurred and fit into various compartments that are most convenient for advertising corporations. 

Moreover, in this new age of technology, surveillance is not really a means for the government to watch over its people. Unless there’s an investigation taking place, American government agencies can’t legally tap into people’s personal data. But that doesn’t mean users are in good hands with the private sector.

When surveillance is handed off from a (traditionally) governmental authority to a distributed web of corporations, the users’ data is commodified. In that sense, you can go on TikTok and bash the government all you’d like. You have a sort of “free speech” that’s maintained by the private company (which doesn’t necessarily ascribe to some larger political agenda). However, there’s a flip side to it. This data acquisition leads to a lost sense of digital privacy because you’re now a product.

TikTok’s data harvesting is not reminiscent of a centralized “Big Brother” overseer. It’s lines of code embedded in statistical models that slingshot your information to other algorithms owned by other companies. Because of that, the individual’s idiosyncrasy is lost and turned into data points fed into a larger machine. (It’s not like a human being ever personally handles your information and looks at it. However, computer or not, the data is still being collected and sold.).

This distinction between governmental and corporate surveillance is important to point out because many people, especially older generations, have developed alarmism about their digital privacy, but for the wrong reasons. Alarm is the right reaction to have in response to our data being farmed and sold off. However, we shouldn’t point to some obscure governmental or political entity trying to indoctrinate everybody. Instead, we should demand that private companies be transparent about what data is being collected. Also, they must allow the user to have more autonomy over their online identity (something perhaps not too dissimilar to the European Union’s data privacy laws, which do not permit browser tracking and history, for instance).

TikTok has made it so that personalized advertisements cannot be turned off. This is dangerous because no one has a shield against inappropriate data mining. Especially worrisome is that TikTok’s algorithm taps into some unconscious habits from which users suffer. In the Netflix special, The Social Dilemma, app designers and developers extensively speak about the addictive programming that goes into major social media apps. This makes it so that a task as simple as scrolling can be so indulging, stimulating and compulsive. What’s even more worrying is that when a user stays on one video for a long(er) period of time, TikTok derives a new data point from the individual’s online habits. The result is an infringement on consumer privacy.

In essence, the basic premise of major social media applications is to profit off of addicted users. Then, by gaining more data, these companies can then construct more developed algorithms, resulting in a vicious feedback loop of consumerism, addiction and data acquisition. That’s why we must work to develop more consumer privacy laws and ensure that social media companies adhere to these laws. Otherwise, the companies’ main incentive will continue to be data mining, which is only detrimental to our online autonomy. 

Ammar Ahmad is an Opinion Columnist and can be reached at ammarz@umich.edu.