Reflective Data Sharing on TikTok: Encouraging Adolescents to Engage with Privacy Settings

Many young people use the video-focused social network platform TikTok, whose business model is based on targeted advertising. From a privacy perspective, targeted advertising is troublesome as it often uses personal information that is collected without users’ knowledge (“passive sharing”). To understand adolescents' privacy management on TikTok and identify levers for potential intervention, an exploratory study with users in Switzerland was conducted based on the COM-B model for behavioral analysis. The findings indicate that TikTok employs deceptive interface designs related to targeted advertising. Awareness about targeted advertising was generally limited and participants had known misconceptions. However, the findings also suggest that a targeted intervention by the social environment with general information on targeted advertising and practical ways to change privacy settings could lead to more “reflective sharing”. Based on our findings, we provide practical recommendations on how such an intervention by peers, parents or teachers could be designed.