US TikTok Users Are Deleting the App in Droves Over Privacy Concerns and Bugs

Since TikTok secured its U.S. future by establishing a majority American-owned entity, it has been beset with technical problems and there are fears over its privacy policy — prompting people to delete the app.

CNBC cites market intelligence firm Sensor Tower, which says that in the past five days, U.S. users have deleted the app 150% more when compared to the last three months.

The deal, which was announced last week, saw ByteDance, TikTok’s Chinese parent company, sign agreements with a group of major investors to form the new company, TikTok USDS Joint Venture LLC. The three managing investors — Oracle, Silver Lake, and Abu Dhabi-based MGX — each hold 15% stakes.

But users were immediately skeptical of the updated privacy policy, which states, “TikTok collects everything you upload, including drafts you never post.” It also says that it will collect keystroke patterns, pull contacts from the user’s phone if syncing is on, and collect sensitive information like “your racial or ethnic origin” as well as “sexual life or sexual orientation, status as transgender or nonbinary, citizenship or immigration status, or financial information.”

While much of this is par for the course for social media terms and conditions, it appears to have riled some users. One creator, Dre Ronayne, who had almost 400,000 followers, announced on Meta’s Threads that she has deleted her account.

“If I can delete my biggest platform because their terms of agreement and censorship have gotten out of control, so can you,” CNBC quotes Ronayne as saying.

Meanwhile, TikTok USDS apologized for multiple bugs on the app, which it blamed on a power outage at a data center.

“We’re continuing to resolve a major infrastructure issue triggered by a power outage at one of our U.S. data center partner sites,” TikTok USDS Joint Venture writes on X. “While the network has been recovered, the outage caused a cascading systems failure that we’ve been working to resolve together with our data center partner.”

The bugs include slow load times and display errors on view counts and like counts.

Could Another App Take Its Place?

One app’s loss is another app’s gain: Engadget reports that an independent app called UpScrolled has seen a surge in interest as TikTok users delete the app. Since the U.S. TikTok deal was announced on Thursday, UpScrolled has been downloaded 41,000 times; prior to that it was getting fewer than 500 downloads per day.

According to Engadget, UpScrolled “looks a bit like Instagram” and like the Meta app, users can share photos as well as shortform videos. However, its default feed is chronological, something many pine over. The Australian-owned app is hoping to capitalize on this moment of uncertainty for TikTok.