ByteDance Allegedly Trained "For You" Algorithm Using Content Scraped without Consent from Other Social Platforms
Rogue: Caused harmAI loose in the worldData exfiltrationDERIVED
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.
Source: AI Incident Database
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.