OK, so while it is never a bad decision to delete social media from your devices (seriously, do it, get rid of as much of it as you can), this post is based on misinformation.
The terms of service everyone is freaking out about are more or less unchanged from what they were prior to the sale. The highlighted section in the pictures here is "Information You Provide" - which is to say, it is detailing how TikTok handles information that YOU PUBLISH on their app. If you post a video where you say something like "as a biracial New Yorker..." or "as a queer person," then you have personally and voluntarily published that information about yourself, and TikTok will store it alongside the rest of the data they have on you.
TikTok was already collecting all of that information, it was already selling all of that information to the highest bidder, and so are all of its competitors. If you're on Instagram, they are also tracking and selling that information, if you use any of Google's apps, it's the same deal. Hell, if you have installed a third party weather app or an app that identifies bird calls or a ticket app for your local public transport, or a period tracker or a news app or calendar or music player or literally any free-to-play mobile game, there's a better-than-average chance that they are collecting and selling that kind of data about you.
The major change now that TikTok has been purchased is not how much information it is extracting from you. The volume remains largely unchanged, ByteDance is a market leader in that regard. If the US government wanted to use TikTok data to identify dissenters, they could almost certainly simply purchase that data from ByteDance and feed it to Palantir the same as they do data from Meta and Google.
The greater worry about the US TikTok app is that the new government affiliated ownership will implement speech-control and heavy-handed algorithmic censorship on the US side of the app, since the gov't push to acquire the app seems to have been prompted in no small part by a panic that the app was used to disseminate information about the Gaza genocide in a way the US government couldn't easily control or interfere with.
It's also a sale that was heavily pushed for by Meta and Google, who have been extremely keen to both neuter TikTok as a competitor in the social video space, AND acquire their technical information and content serving algorithms to optimize their own products to be more competitive. Which, by the way, this is also relevant information: ONLY the US version of the app is now controlled by US billionaire interests, the global version used by everyone else in the world remains under the control of ByteDance, and by extension the Chinese government.
To be clear, I'm not recommending that anyone should be on TikTok, and I am not saying that the amount of identifying private data that these apps collect from you isn't fucking horrifying and invasive and dangerous.
I'm saying that people flying into a panic over supposedly "new" dystopian terms of service are either jumping at shadows, or else are rather cynically trying to farm engagement by playing on people's fears to prompt sharing and reposting. Panicking doesn't help anyone, and spreading misinformation doesn't help either.
Yes, everyone should be especially wary of the US branch of TikTok after the sale, but they didn't hide their nefarious doomsday plot in a ToS update like cartoon villains. They bought the app in part because it was already doing all the nefarious invasive data-collection we're afraid of, but it was under the ownership of a foreign authoritarian regime, and they wanted to cut out the middle-man.
If you want to start protecting your privacy online, deleting as much social media as possible from all of your devices is a very good place to start, but just panic-deleting TikTok is not going to make you any safer. At best it'll create a false sense of security while fourteen other apps on your phone harvest all the same data for all the same data-brokers. Yelling at other people for still being on the app won't help either, that is mostly just a way to draw a false demarcation line that you can feel better about being on the "right" side of.
Absolutely uninstall TikTok, but do it based on a factual understanding of what these apps are and how online privacy works, not because someone posted a breathless set of screenshots and the word "DYSTOPIAN!!!" on tumblr dot com.
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