👉 Background: Everyone knows about TikTok. It's the place that keeps us trapped for hours dancing with a hologram or miming to new tracks. But, behind these trends is a heap of user data.

👉 What happened: The big Q is: who actually has access to this data? Turns out... A lot of people. TikTok recently confirmed reports that employees outside the US - including in China - can see data from US users.

👉 What else: Now, a Liberal senator has written to TikTok's Aussie execs to ask how secure our data is over here. It comes as regulators become increasingly concerned about how and where TikTok data is shared.

What's the key learning?

💡User data is a really powerful tool and, if it ends up in the wrong hands, the consequences can be pretty serious. User data lets different brands or companies push their ads onto us… It can even let them discriminate against us or try to influence how we think.

💡Remember Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica scandal? That saw 87 million peoples’ data accessed and misused to influence the 2016 US election! But it ain’t just ads - our personal data can also be misused for things like identity theft or scams.

💡No one really knows how TikTok is using or sharing our data, a problem compounded by the fact that the Chinese Government has a stake in TikTok's parent company ByteDance.

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