Elaine Fox, Head of Privacy, Europe, TikTok

At TikTok, our mission is to inspire creativity and bring joy. We want to support our community to confidently discover, create, and enjoy entertaining content by helping them understand the information we collect and how we are using it. That's why we build privacy into our platform by design, and we provide people with meaningful choices over the information that they share on TikTok.

We continually review and strengthen the protections we give our community and have introduced industry-leading measures to protect people's privacy. This has included making all accounts belonging to people under the age of 16 private by default and strengthening the default privacy settings for those under the age of 18. We've also set out our plans to lean local when it comes to data protection in the EU, by establishing a data centre in Ireland that will be the home of European user data when it's operational by late 2022.

Making our Privacy Policy even more user-friendly

Transparency is a key part of our approach to privacy. It's our job to make sure our community can clearly understand the information we collect, how it's used, and how it is shared, so people can make informed decisions about their own privacy settings.

We already do this in several ways, including in our Privacy and Security page on our Safety Centre to explain our approach to data to help educate our community on their privacy choices. We also have a separate summary of our Privacy Policies that's easier to read for those between the ages of 13 and 18, and next month, we will introduce new Privacy Highlights for Teens.

These new Privacy Highlights will be a series of simple videos which aim to explain the key elements of how user data is collected and used on TikTok. This content will be shown to new community members under 18, and we'll also send a pop-up to our existing members to encourage them to check out the highlights.

Striving for greater transparency is also why we have revised our Privacy Policy for the European Economic Area, United Kingdom and Switzerland (EEA/UK/CH Privacy Policy). While we have not made any changes to the data we collect, how we process it or how we store it, we have amended the policy with the goal of making it easier to read, more user friendly, and simpler to navigate.

In this update to our Privacy Policy we've:

  • Added a standalone regional webpage for our EEA/UK/CH Privacy Policy
  • Restructured the layout and added more navigation options to make it easier to read
  • Increased transparency by providing more detail about what data we collect, how we use it, and how it is shared
  • Provided more detail about user privacy rights, including useful links to instructions on how our community can exercise their rights
  • Created a new section that explains the legal bases and the types of information that we use for each processing purpose

Constantly improving our policies and resources

We constantly aim to improve the policies, tools and resources available to our community, but we know that making our policies easier to understand is only the first step. We're committed to educating and empowering our community to use them. That's why in the coming months we're excited to share more about a new educational campaign that will launch across Europe to help our community better understand the choices they can make about their privacy and safety on TikTok. As we continue our work, we look forward to hearing feedback from our community, NGOs, regulators, and other crucial partners.