TikTok new terms: Is the platform suddenly collecting immigration status and sexual orientation data?

If you opened TikTok today and felt a knot in your stomach reading the “new” terms of service, you are definitely not alone. While we highlighted earlier today how users were panicking over the forced popup and fears regarding precise location tracking, the conversation has quickly shifted as people began actually reading the fine print.

Now, the outrage is also being focused on specific, jarring lines about the collection of “citizenship or immigration status” and “sexual orientation.”

One particular Reddit post that put the spotlight on these lines from the privacy policy page has kicked up a big discussion.

Here’s a snippet of the section that’s kicked up a storm:

Information You Provide may include sensitive personal information, as defined under applicable state privacy laws, such as information from users under the relevant age threshold, information you disclose in survey responses or in your user content about your racial or ethnic origin, national origin, religious beliefs, mental or physical health diagnosis, sexual life or sexual orientation, status as transgender or nonbinary, citizenship or immigration status, or financial information.

For many, seeing this laid out in black and white was the breaking point, with users on forums asking, “Have they always tracked citizenship??? Am I tweaking?”

I wanted to find out if this text was actually new or if we just haven’t been paying attention. I tried to do some quick digging on the Wayback Machine to compare today’s policy against older versions, but it seems I wasn’t the only one with that idea.

I accidentally exited the page, and when I tried to go back to grab a screenshot, I kept hitting a “Failed with status: 429” error. It seems the archive servers are under heavy load because everyone is trying to fact-check this right now.

Since the archive was struggling, I turned to the community and found a thread on Reddit where users were already dissecting the legal text. It turns out, this specific language isn’t brand new.

A user named TheMrWolfie managed to pull up older archives and pointed out that the section mentioning “status as transgender or nonbinary, citizenship or immigration status” has actually been in the privacy policy for quite some time. From what I had managed to gather, it was added with an update to the page in August, 2024.

Here’s the image the OP shared (new and old text for comparison): 

So, why the sudden outrage? It comes down to visibility. In the past, these terms might have been buried in a link you scrolled past. Today, users were forced to acknowledge them via a mandatory popup to continue using the app. This forced acceptance has made users hyper-aware of what they are agreeing to.

While it is technically true that these clauses regarding immigration and sexual orientation existed in previous versions, that doesn’t make them any less concerning for privacy-minded users.

The realization that the app has already had permission to collect this data for over a year is arguably scarier than if they had just added it today. As the discussions online suggest, the fact that they’ve been doing this while no one noticed is the real wake-up call, leading many to finally hit “uninstall.”

Featured image generated with AI

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