Ensuring User Safety and Building Trust at TikTok

At TikTok, our security team is constantly working to ensure the safety of our users in an ever-changing threat landscape. We understand that consumers are now more aware of potential risks, and we believe that a well-informed community is beneficial for everyone, including us in the security field. This awareness drives us to continuously improve our systems and question our assumptions.

To achieve our goal of keeping users safe, we not only focus on protecting them from real threats but also aim to minimize confusion that may arise from perceived or misinterpreted threats. As engineers, we are naturally attuned to identifying actual and potential risks. However, providing true peace of mind to our users requires us to go beyond the realm of actual and potential threats and consider perception.

For instance, earlier this year, there were concerns about clipboard access on TikTok. Although we believed that there was no actual risk involved, we acknowledged the concern and took immediate steps to reduce clipboard access. This action was taken even though the information never left the user's device and was consistent with the behavior of other apps, including news media apps.

We prioritize providing peace of mind to our community over marginal functionality or convenience. In line with this, we are actively working on cleaning up inactive code in the app to minimize potential confusion or misconceptions. Additionally, we are enhancing our self-developed code for automated attack defense, which detects and prevents inauthentic and bot-like behavior. We are also collaborating with industry-leading partners to further prevent abuse.

These efforts go beyond what many of our peers do and require significant time and resources. However, we consider them crucial in building trust with our community. We appreciate when security experts ask critical questions about how technology companies ensure the safety of their users. This dialogue helps advance trust and safety for all users, which is our ultimate goal.

Ultimately, TikTok's mission is to inspire creativity and bring joy to our users. We believe that we can achieve this most effectively when our users have complete peace of mind.