PrivacyHigh
ByteDance Allegedly Trained "For You" Algorithm Using Content Scraped without Consent from Other Social Platforms
- Occurred
- Jan 15, 2017
- Published
- Apr 4, 2022
- Source
- AI Incident Database
Summary
ByteDance allegedly scraped short-form videos, usernames, profile pictures, and descriptions of accounts on Instagram, Snapchat, and other sources, and uploaded them without consent on Flipagram, TikTok’s predecessor, in order to improve its “For You” algorithm's performance on American users.
Developers
- ByteDance
Deployers
- ByteDance
Harmed parties
- Instagram users
- Snapchat users
- American social media users
Classification
Category confidence: 95%
Severity confidence: 90%
Rationale: Unauthorized scraping of user data from other platforms without consent constitutes a significant privacy violation.
Classifier: Qwen/Qwen3.5-35B-A3B-FP8