The most widely used short-video application, TikTok, has worked on improving the privacy of the teenagers’ accounts on the platform. Every teenager aged between 13 and 15 who signs up on the application, will have their account secured better than before that too, by default. The new privacy settings will only allow the friends of the user to view and comment on the videos moreover; teenage accounts won’t be suggested to other users. The company will also suspend every user to comment on videos by these accounts even if their profile is public.
TikTok has a Duet and Stitch feature through which users can recreate, respond, or repost videos posted by another user. For under 16 profiles, the Duet and Stitch feature will also be disabled. In addition, users under the age of 17 won’t be able to download the videos. The Duet and Stitch feature will be restricted to the friends of users aged between 16 and 17.
The company is trying to shield teenage accounts as much as possible since 2020. In the previous year, TikTok allowed parents to control their kid’s account by setting restrictions on it, followed by granting the parents the authority to tweak their child’s account privacy settings as well. Not to forget, the application disabled the feature of Direct Messages for all users under the age of 16.
The older version of the app, Musical.ly was alleged for not being able to protect the accounts of young teenagers and failing to get parental approval of the users aged below 13 years. In order to set free from the allegations, the company paid $5.7 million back in 2019.
TikTok app now has a separate feature known as “TikTok for younger users” that only shows selected, organized or to be more precise “age-appropriate” videos.
