Jan 15, 2017Confirmed
ByteDance Allegedly Trained "For You" Algorithm Using Content Scraped without Consent from Other Social Platforms
Rogue: Caused harmAI loose in the worldData exfiltrationDERIVED
Approved by person, Oct 11, 2026. How entries are approved
ByteDance allegedly scraped short-form videos, usernames, profile pictures, and descriptions of accounts on Instagram, Snapchat, and other sources, and uploaded them without consent on Flipagram, TikTok’s predecessor, in order to improve its “For You” algorithm's performance on American users.
What this means for youAt home, photos, videos and usernames you post publicly may be copied by other companies to train AI without asking you. At work, check what your business posts publicly and whether platform terms limit scraping. In government, this shows why data-scraping and consent rules matter.
Sources
- AI Incident Databasehttps://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/190
Data from the AI Incident Database (incidentdatabase.ai), licensed CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/). McGregor, S. (2021) Preventing Repeated Real World AI Failures by Cataloging Incidents: The AI Incident Database. IAAI-21.
Source data license: CC BY-SA 4.0 (database). Report contents keep their own rights; reports.text, submissions, images and videos are excluded from the data license.
rogue:R4
Covered by snapshot 45
da93f03b406f409940d0a6ef47b526607f82ebf457d98f69299b88aceede576a
This entry is record number 1970. It has not been edited since it was approved; the hash above would not match if it had. How to verify