As you're scrolling through your For You feed, checking out the latest viral music track, the fresh novel that #BookTok is talking about or learning a brand new skill, you'll occasionally see adverts for products or services.

Ads are not only the way that we keep the platform free to use, but also how we connect millions of people to products they love. Brands are a key part of the TikTok experience, and we think the ads you see should be curated and relevant, just like your For You feed is.

Serving you relevant ads

In order to deliver that personalised, just For You advertising, we currently ask your permission to use two main sources of data.

The first is data we collect based on your on-TikTok activity, like the accounts you follow, the videos you like and your profile information. The second is data based on your off-TikTok activity, like information that businesses share with us in order to reach potential customers on TikTok. For example, if you sign up for your favourite band's mailing list, they might try and reach you with an ad on TikTok about their upcoming tour.

To allow us to show you ads that you are more likely to be interested in, we're making some changes to the way our advertising works. First of all, we're adding a new 'About this ad' feature so you can long-press on an ad to see how we're using your TikTok activity to better inform the ads that we are showing you. Alongside this, we're also changing the controls you have over ads based on your activity on TikTok.

What does it mean for you?

Currently, people in the EEA, UK or Switzerland have to opt-in to receive personalised advertising based on their on-TikTok activity. From July 13th, all users over the age of 18 will now start seeing personalised advertising, which we’ll serve using your on-TikTok activity from that date, so that your feed contains advertising that we think you're more interested in.

If you're under 18, the controls you currently have are not changing and you'll still be able to opt-in or out of personalised ads based on your on-TikTok activity.

We know our community values seeing ads that are relevant, and we hope this change will lead to a better in-app experience. After these changes, you'll be more likely to see adverts that are more relevant to your interests.

You’ll still be able to choose whether you want to receive personalised advertising based on your off-TikTok activity and you can review and change this at any time in your in-app privacy settings.

As well as those controls, you can also skip an ad, just like you can skip past any video on the For You feed, and if you see an ad that you aren't interested in, then you can hold down on the screen and tell us you're not interested in it, which will help inform the ads you see in future.

Want to find out more?

As part of this change, we're also updating our Privacy Policy for the EEA, UK, and Switzerland to reflect the new way we're processing your data, and you can read the updated policy on our Privacy Policy page. You can read more about the specific changes we are making, and how they might impact you, in our summary here.

If you want to understand a bit more about how adverts work on TikTok, you can read about our new 'About this ad' feature' and learn how we use your data in our advertising so you're seeing relevant ads in your feed.

We're constantly working to create a better advertising experience for our TikTok community, allowing them to see more ads that suit their interests, and these changes form an important part of that effort. We believe these changes will allow us to provide more relevant ads for you, as well as give you more insight into why you see the ads that you see.

Update on July 12, 2022 at 6pm CET

An update on our changes to personalised advertising: While we engage on the questions from stakeholders about our proposed personalised advertising changes in Europe, we are pausing the introduction of that part of our privacy policy update. We believe that personalised advertising provides the best in-app experience for our community and brings us in line with industry practices, and we look forward to engaging with stakeholders and addressing the concerns.