The FTC and the Justice Department are investigating claims that TikTok, the popular social media app with close ties to China, violated a 2019 agreement to protect children's privacy. Read the rest
Remember that guy who traded one red paperclip up to a house in Saskatchewan? Well, now there's an anonymous Bay Area woman on TikTok who is looking to trade a bobby pin to get one. Since May 18, the day she started the Trade Me Project, she's gone from a bobby pin to a pair of earrings to four margarita glasses to a vacuum. Her latest trade up? She cleaned up that Bissell and traded it for a snowboard.
Follow the Trade Me Project on TikTok to see her next trade-ups and DM her on Instagram if you have something you want to trade with her.
@trademeprojectTrading my way from a bobby pin to a house #fyp
@trademeproject
Trading a bobby pin for a house. Pt 4 #fyp #trademeproject
♬ original sound - trademeproject
screengrabs via Trade Me Project/IG
The US Navy has issued a policy banning the social media app TikTok from government-issued mobile devices, saying the China-owned video messaging service is a “cybersecurity threat.” Read the rest
The increasingly popular social media application TikTok has a concerning relationship with the Chinese state. That link became ever the more concerning today, when reports began circulating of a brand new partnership between the company that owns TikTok, ByteDance, and the government of China. Read the rest
Yesterday Bytedance, the company that acquired the tween-centric app Musica.ly and relaunched it as Tiktok, was been sued by a parents' group for violating the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act by gathering, storing, and selling private information about their children. Today, they settled the case on terms that have not been disclosed. Read the rest
China-based technology company ByteDance is on a charm offensive, reports Reuters, ramping up efforts to distance its popular social app TikTok from the rest of its Chinese operations. Read the rest
Tiktok bills itself as apolitical, despite the fact that is both a de facto arm of Chinese political propaganda (and, weirdly, for Uyghur human rights activists). Read the rest
Tiktok (formerly Musica.ly) is the massively popular, $75b social media sensation primarily used for short lip-sync clips with high-precision choreography and endlessly inventive special effects and video techniques. Read the rest
It's been a year since Chinese social media giant Bytedance relaunched its super-popular app Musica.ly as Tiktok; the company is now valued at $75b, and in the USA it has become a serious challenge to US-based social media companies, courting a young audience (so young that it's getting into legal hot water over it). Read the rest
Life360 is an app that lets you track a mobile phone user in fine-grained, realtime detail, with options to set alert for things like "is this person exceeding the speed limit?" It's widely used by parents to track their teens, and this seems to be the summer where it comes into its own, with millions of families around the world relying on it to act as a kind of remote leash for their kids. Read the rest
Kaitlyn Reed created a Twitter thread of videos of (mostly Chinese) workers performing manual tasks with incredible acrobaticism, dexterity and flair; the videos were ganked from Tiktok, the massively popular China-based video platform that is mostly know in the west as a place where tweens make and share elaborately choreographic lipsync videos augmented with a suite of skillfully applied video effects. Read the rest
TikTok is an app that makes it easy for people to make short lip-synching videos, which unsurprisingly makes it a goldmine of creativity and memes. TikTok recently got in hot water with the Federal Trade Commission because it failed to comply with Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA). COPPA requires online services that are either “directed at” children under the age of 13 or have knowledge that they have users who are under 13 to arrange for parental permission before they start collecting personal information about those users. Read the rest
