TikTok - like all mobile apps - has access to much more personal information than what you can glean from someone's occasional purchase or traditional media subscription. 1. There is a much bigger privacy problem with mobile apps in general (as opposed to web sites or physical surveillance), because people do not tend to concern themselves with granting the app permissions like location tracking, use of camera, use of microphone etc. Even though people know these permissions allow the app to invade their privacy, they allow it because they want to access the fun features those permissions enable. 2. Social media apps in particular are even more privacy-invading than regular apps, because in addition to being able to track what you are doing with your device and where you take it, they also integrate the personal information that has been collected into a social graph that ties you together with other people. This isn't just about the other people you communicate with on the social media network itself, but also any other person you communicate with on your device (because people tend to grant access to their device's contacts for useful features like "find my friends" or "invite my friends"). 3. Another aspect of privacy invasion in social media is that most content is user-generated. So people are not just having their personal information collected passively via all the permissions that were granted on the device, they are also actively uploading photos, videos and other content which is processed automatically on the servers to detect speech (allowing things like automatic subtitles or translation), faces (to allow tagging of friends or applying fun filters that modify your appearance) and so on. 4. People spend hours and hours per day inside these apps. For many people social media is the primary source of information that they consume - more compelling or trustworthy to them than traditional media like journals, magazines and newspapers or newer media like blogs, mailing lists and wikis. This puts a lot of power into the hands of the companies that run these apps to shape people's views on a topic in subtle ways, for example by only surfacing content that promotes one view and not another. In my opinion TikTok is extremely problematic and I think it should be aggressively regulated. However, I also believe whatever policies are applied to TikTok should also be applied to other social media apps and the companies behind them. The challenge is that most governments are behind the times on regulating the tech industry. A lot of old media consolidation has already occurred in the past couple of decades, granting companies a huge amount of power in what kind of news and entertainment people consume, and governments have done little or nothing to rein it in. Now the tech industry has joined the party and politicians are still reluctant to do anything. The cynical reading is that in authoritarian and democratic countries alike politicians see this kind of power as useful to achieve their own ends, rather than something that should be strictly curtailed for the good of the people. I don't know how we are going to dig ourselves out of this hole. The EU has made a noble effort with some of their privacy laws, but those don't really go far enough. We cannot solve this as individuals. As Matt pointed out in a sibling comment, often these apps are the only way to communicate with certain friends, family members or business partners, so there is little choice but to have them installed. But even if you refuse to install them, these companies still build a partial profile on you based on the information they can gather from people you know who have installed it. The only way to give people back their right to privacy or right to be forgotten is going to be through government intervention. Alas this TikTok witch hunt is not it.