TikTok Monitored Users Who Watched LGBT Content

metroweekly.com:

An investigation by The Wall Street Journal finds that the popular video-streaming app TikTok compiled a list of users who were being monitored after watching gay-themed content on the app.According to former company employees in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia, TikTok compiled a list of users who watched clips tagged as “LGBT” and stored it on a dashboard.Lists were also compiled for users who perused videos dealing with other topics, but the employees didn’t believe that those lists raised the same level of concern for users’ safety and privacy.The former employees, who objected to the policy, were worried that the users’ information would be shared with outside parties or could be potentially used to blackmail users.They brought their concerns to top executives at the company in 2020 and 2021.Typically, many social media companies compile data on users based on their online behavior, with the intention of using it to select content or advertisements that a user might be interested in seeing while using the app.But best practices among social media companies generally discourage tracking traits such as sexuality, especially in parts of the world where homosexuality is criminalized or where LGBTQ people can be harassed or assaulted for their identities.

Last year, the LGBTQ advocacy group GLAAD urged tech companies to take greater steps to safeguard user data and privacy, including stopping targeted surveillance advertising, over concerns that such information could harm LGBTQ people if it fell into the wrong hands.According to the former TikTok employees, the app organizes all the videos its users post into a web of clusters, sorted by topic.The clusters are labeled with identifiers, including ones.