🛡️📲 TikTok and teen privacy: New study
The study is the first to examine how young people aged 12-18 manage their privacy on TikTok when it comes to personal videos. The research team interviewed 54 teenagers.
𝗦𝗼𝗺𝗲 𝗼𝗳 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗳𝗶𝗻𝗱𝗶𝗻𝗴𝘀:
- Adolescents in the sample actively engaged in privacy management.
- Motivations: Avoiding publicity or negative reactions/emotions, actively achieving privacy and privacy as a personal value beyond TikTok.
- Examples of privacy management strategies:
"Private creators" use the platform only to create and edit videos and share them on other social networks (e.g. WhatsApp, Snapchat). "Public creators" use e.g. various accounts for different audiences, only share certain content publicly and try to detect fake followers.
- Interviewees were more concerned with protecting their privacy from their immediate social environment than with institutional or commercial privacy issues.
- Many of the teens interviewed have been publishing on TikTok since well before the legal age of 13.
𝗖𝗼𝗻𝗰𝗿𝗲𝘁𝗲 𝗮𝗽𝗽𝗿𝗼𝗮𝗰𝗵𝗲𝘀 𝗳𝗼𝗿 𝗽𝗿𝗶𝘃𝗮𝗰𝘆 𝗶𝗻𝘁𝗲𝗿𝘃𝗲𝗻𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻𝘀 (𝗽.𝟮𝟯𝟬-𝟮𝟯𝟭):
- TikTok users: Share/remove content consciously; use alternative social media apps to share TikToks; back up user credentials to migitate account loss; enable privacy settings
- TikTok platform: Improve privacy features e.g. user blocking, age verification; access to lost user accounts; provide privacy tutorials; do not nudge users to publish personal content publicly
- Family, friends, schools, youth workers: Support children's privacy efforts; show long-term privacy risks; explain TikTok's business model; use TikTok to understand privacy issues
- Policy makers and privacy advocates: Create and enforce privacy laws
- Other TikTok users: Mentor and warn less experienced users about privacy issues
- OS vendors and vendors of other apps: Enforce app privacy in OS; provide housekeeping functionalities to remove personal content from public apps
Full paper: https://lnkd.in/eQXv-aWk
Read more in this SRF article (in German): https://lnkd.in/eVEMXj6Q
#Privacy #TikTok ZHAW Zürcher Hochschule für Angewandte Wissenschaften, CYREN ZH, DIZH, Nico Ebert, Tim Geppert, Joanna Strycharz, Melanie Knieps, Elke Brucker-Kley, SRF - Schweizer Radio und Fernsehen, Christian Seewald