TikTok will not introduce end-to-end encryption, saying it makes users less safe

Brilliant. They're repackaging the argument governments have long made about E2EE being dangerous to children.

DMs are akin to private conversations in real life. Thus, every DM feature should entail E2EE.

It’s ok for a platform to not feature private conversations. They should just have no DM feature at all, then; make all messages publicly visible.

Private conversations are indeed not for all ages. Parents should be able to grant access to that on individual basis.

This might be off-topic but on-topic about child safety... but I'm surprised people are being myopic about age verification. Age verification should be banned, but people ignore that nowadays most widely used online services already ask for your age and act accordingly: twitter, youtube, google in general, any online marketplace. They already got so much data on their users and optimize their algorithms for those groups in an opaque way.

So yeah, age verification should be taken down, as well as the datamining these companies do and the opaque tunning of their algorithms. It baffles me: people are concerned about their children's DMs but are not concerned about what companies serves them and what they do with their data.

TikTok is a front for government surveillance, so it's not really surprising that this is their position.

Why would you use TikTok for private communications anyway? It's mostly a public short video sharing platform.

I feel like this makes sense for a platform that targets teens. Plus, I wouldn't trust TikTok to implement E2E encryption properly—who knows what they've snuck into their client.

Do you feel safer knowing DMs are not encrypted?

There is no way to do E2EE on a traditional social media platform with user-generated content and comply with existing US law.

You can’t moderate an E2EE platform.

Fun fact - there is a big correlation between World Wars and compulsory education. Of course governments and big corporations "care" about children. Of course!

Reminder, Larry “citizens shouldn’t get any privacy” Ellison now owns tik tok. If you’re still using it or have friends and family using it you should stop immediately. It WILL eventually be used against you if this regime gets its way.

https://digitaldemocracynow.org/2025/03/22/the-troubling-imp...

Since when is E2EE controversial? Not using E2EE should be controversial.

TikTok’s stance against end-to-end encryption is unsurprising but still concerning. TikTok is a source of information on many topics, such as the genocide in Gaza, which traditional media underreport and many governments try to suppress. The network effect of big social media platforms means many people will likely talk about these topics in TikTok DMs. No matter what legal controls TikTok claims to enforce, there is no substitute for technological barriers for preventing invasions of privacy and government overreach. This is yet another example where corporations and governments sacrifice people’s autonomy and privacy in the name of security.

"The situation is made more complex because TikTok has long faced accusations that ties to the Chinese state may put users' data at risk."

And yet, it's even more complex than that, since it's now owned by cronies of the current US President. I've never had a TikTok account, but conceptually I was mostly pretty okay with being spied-upon by China. I'm never going to China.

clown emoji

It's the Max app for Americans, now with 900% more US and IL government spying.

Fascinating. What a time to be alive.

> Grooming and harassment risks are very real in DMs [direct messages] so TikTok now can credibly argue that it's prioritising 'proactive safety' over 'privacy absolutism' which is a pretty powerful soundbite

Means they read every message

BBC calling encryption "controversial privacy tech" is deeply disappointing and dangerous.

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The core tension here isn’t really about encryption itself, it’s about moderation models.

Most large platforms rely heavily on server-side visibility for abuse detection, spam filtering, recommendation systems, and safety tooling. End-to-end encryption removes that visibility by design. Once a platform is built around centralized analysis of user content, adding strong E2EE later isn’t just a feature toggle — it conflicts with large parts of the existing architecture.