The newly created US joint venture of TikTok has updated their privacy policies, which allows the platform to gather more precise location data about its 200,000,000 American users.
Investors finalized an agreement with ByteDance’s Chinese owners to run the platform for short-form videos in the United States. TikTok can now collect “precise location data” depending on the settings you choose, replacing the old limit.
TikTok’s latest version of the app did not collect GPS data for US users before this update. Instead, it collected SIM card and IP addresses to determine location.
The users will have to accept the notification via a popup. TikTok does not confirm when the feature will roll out.
This platform uses location data to highlight nearby events and businesses.
TikTok USDS Joint Venture LLC is made up of three major investors. Oracle is a cloud computing company that has been a big supporter of AI.He helped to facilitate this deal. Silver Lake is a US-based tech investment company, as well Abu Dhabi’s government fund MGX. ByteDance holds a small minority of less than 20%.
This new venture will take “complete data privacy and security measures” in order to safeguard US user data as well as the TikTok algorithms. Oracle will manage a retraining process for TikTok’s algorithm to recommend content using data from existing American users within Oracle’s US secure cloud environment.
