Honestly, we don’t know what’s worse: Being flooded by ads on social media or being flooded by ads on social media that have been designed to target your specific interests. It’s creepy, to say the least knowing that some faceless entity on the internet can monitor your activity and recommend you products that it thinks you might enjoy. This is about to become a serious issue on the hyper-popular app TikTok which has confirmed that it’s making personalised ads for all users mandatory.
It used to be that you could opt-out of personalised ads but the option is being removed for all users. So you’re just going to have to deal with ads based on your personal browsing and the specific content you’ve consumed. The whole switch over will happen on 15 April and if you want to avoid the change… well, you’ll have to bite the bullet if you want to keep up to date with the latest trends on social media.
TikTok wants to get to know you
TikTok users were greeted by a notification this morning that laid out everything they needed to know about the mandatory change. “To help TikTok stay free, we partner with advertisers to show you ads… Starting April 15, your settings will change and the ads you’ll see may start to be based on what you do on TikTok.”
It’s a fairly common practice, but that doesn’t make it less intrusive or annoying. Users will still be able to determine with TikTok can pull data from other apps and websites to determine what kinds of ads are displayed. So at least your Facebook and Twitter searches won’t affect your ads, just your activity on TikTok itself.
“You still have control over whether ads can be more tailored to your based on data from our advertising partners,” continues the notification message.
Source: The Verge