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TikTok will start collecting biometric data like ‘faceprints and voiceprints’ from your posts

This comes after the company settled a recent lawsuit over data collection.

by
Alex Gatewood
June 4, 2021

Image: KnowTechie

TikTok has become the latest company to add a hefty revision to its privacy policy. The company has now updated its policy to better reflect the type of information that it collects from users. Most notably this update was issued to let users know that TikTok may be collecting your biometric information.

This privacy policy update comes after TikTok ran into some troubles with its practices recently. A few months ago, the company settled an Illinois lawsuit that claimed it violated certain biometric privacy laws. In addition to paying out almost $100 million in settlements, the company promised that it would become more transparent with its data collection.

That leads us to today. TikTok has now upgraded its privacy policy with a full section detailing what kind of information it may collect. And part of this collection is biometric data, like faces and voices.

“We may collect information about the images and audio that are a part of your User Content, such as identifying the objects and scenery that appear, the existence and location within an image of face and body features and attributes, the nature of the audio, and the text of the words spoken in your User Content.”

In addition to using this data for some of the features available on the app, TikTok has confirmed that this data can and will be used for targeted advertising and content recommendation. The latter part of that is absolutely necessary for the platform, which thrives on recommending rabbit holes of content to its users.

While nobody loves hearing that companies are collecting our data, it is nice when they are transparent about it. TikTok has built a hugely successful social platform and that probably couldn’t have been done without the data it was able to collect. At least now it has become the norm to be transparent about data collection.

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