TikTok admits that it analyzes users’ videos to determine if they are underage

March 24 (Portaltic/EP) –

The CEO of TikTokShou Zi Chew, has admitted to the United States Committee on Energy and Commerce that the platform collects and analyzes the videos that users post to determine their age as long as you suspect they are minors.

At the moment, the Chinese platform, owned by ByteDance, can block accounts if it considers that those who use them are minors (13 years in the case of Spain). To recover them, the social network forces users to send them a photo of the national identity document or a ‘selfie’ holding that same card.

Recently the company has also raised the minimum age for live eventsso that users must be at least 18 years old, instead of the 16 that was required until October 2022.

The security and privacy User data, especially minors and children, as well as the use that the platform makes of their information are some of the main concerns in countries such as France, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands and, especially, the United States.

So much so that this country is pressuring ByteDance to sell TikTok for allegedly spying on American journalists and citizens. In fact, the Government has required TikTok to distribute its shares if it wants to continue operating in its territory.

Earlier this month, the White House warned that the social network was a potential national security risk, claiming it could be trying to collect data from its citizens.

To clarify the way in which he treats user information, the CEO of TikTok has appeared before the Committee on Commerce and Energy of the United States House of Representatives, where he has commented on how the company examines those users who are considered minors.

First of all, Shou Zi Chew has indicated that he uses the age control filterthat is, that at the time of creating an account, the platform asks the user for the day, month and year of his birth.

It should be remembered that TikTok distinguishes three types of personal accounts. The first one is the users from 13 to 15 years old, that have the default private account, They do not have the direct message function enabled and in which only contacts included in the Friends section can comment.

They are followed by the accounts of users from 16 to 17 years old –that they can configure it as private at the time of its creation and that they cannot receive direct messages from other users by default, among other characteristics– and those of those over 18 years of agewho can set all their preferences from the Settings section.

In any case, this verification system is not enough to maintain security on the platform, considering that users can lie about their real age.

Asked about this, Chew has acknowledged before said American institution that it scans the videos that users publish to determine their real age. “Is [contenido] public. So if you post a video, [el usuario] choose to allow other people to see your video”, has argued the CEO of TikTok, according to TechCrunch.

This medium recalls that, although TikTok explains its policies in depth about the way it acts when it detects underage users on the platform, it does not offer details of how it estimates their age or the procedures it uses to find out.

In this regard, it should be noted that last year Bloomberg reported that the company had met in 2021 with two providers of ‘software’ dedicated to estimation of age using biometric parameters.

However, this medium announced that one of the directors of the platform had decided to reject this commercial proposal for fear that the platform would be pointed out for espionage practices with underage users.

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The ByteDance-owned platform is not the only one that has focused its work on reinforcing identification methods, since Instagram has spent months with features such as taking a selfie video so that the company estimate the age of the account owner.

When announcing this method, Meta explained that had teamed up with Yoti, a company specialized in online age verification, to guarantee people’s privacy. Likewise, he insisted that after carrying out his corresponding verifications, he deleted the video, without this other company being able to have access to more data on the users studied.

The company uses this same procedure in the event that users choose verification through an identity document, an option available in Spain since November last year.