If you used an app like TikTok, what information would you be comfortable giving the company access to and having tied to your identity? What information would you prefer not to be tracked? What is the tradeoff between access to the app’s content and privacy?

TikTok, known in China as Douyin, is a short-form video sharing app owned by Chinese parent company ByteDance. It was the world’s fastest-growing app from 2020 to 2022. With more than 1.3 billion active users, TikTok is the world’s most downloaded app. With a young, engaged user base, TikTok is a cultural powerhouse of internet superstars, brands, opinions, and data. However, given TikTok’s widespread use and influence, its Chinese ownership raises concerns about user privacy. Data privacy expectations differ greatly between China and Western countries such as the United States and the EU nations. And although Douyin and TikTok operate on separate platforms, signaling that TikTok user data is protected from the Chinese government, concerns remain. In 2020 alone, TikTok was implicated in data use scandals involving the improper collection of data from children, harvesting personal data on over a million users, and gathering user facial recognition data, all without user consent. Data privacy concerns also became a major issue of national security for the United States. In that year, then U.S. President Donald Trump moved to ban new TikTok downloads, and the U.S. Senate passed a bill to ban TikTok from all government-issued devices, fueling furious debate. A year later newly elected U.S. President Joe Biden formally lifted the Trump-era bans. TikTok users are thrilled that the bans are lifted, but others are still concerned about privacy, data collection, and data access.