With the recently finalized deal to keep it operating in the United States, TikTok’s American-run joint venture is moving to significantly expand the personal data it collects from its 200 million U.S. users, raising immediate privacy concerns. The deal follows a years-long saga that nearly saw the app banned in the U.S. in January 2025.
Precise Location Tracking on the Table
The company published a revised privacy policy this week following the formal creation of “TikTok USDS Joint Venture LLC”. A key change allows the platform to now “collect precise location data, depending on your settings.” This marks a notable shift from its previous policy, which permitted only the collection of “approximate” location data derived from a user’s SIM card or IP address.
According to the policy, this precise location sharing (expected to be optional and turned off by default) has not yet been activated for U.S. users, who would see a pop-up request to opt in. The company has not specified a rollout date. A similar “Nearby Feed” feature using precise location is already active for users in the UK and Europe.
Beyond Location: AI Interactions in Focus
The data expansion is not limited to geography. The new policy also broadens permissions to gather detailed information on user interactions with TikTok’s AI tools. This includes the prompts and questions users submit, as well as metadata about “how, when, and where AI content was prompted or created.”
In a statement, the joint venture said its mandate is “to secure U.S. user data, apps, and the algorithm through comprehensive data privacy and cybersecurity measures”. As part of this, cloud computing giant Oracle—a key managing investor in the venture—will oversee retraining TikTok’s powerful content recommendation algorithm within its U.S. cloud environment.
The Deal That Avoided a 2025 Ban
The joint venture is the resolution of a multi-year struggle over the app. The U.S. government’s concerns centered on national security risks, fearing that the Chinese government could access data from American users or manipulate the content they see. This led Congress to pass a law in April 2024, signed by President Biden, that required TikTok’s Chinese parent company, ByteDance, to sell its U.S. operations by January 19, 2025, or face a nationwide ban.
The law took effect, and on January 19, 2025, the app was briefly removed from major app stores and went offline for U.S. users for about 12 hours. The ban was reversed hours later after then-President-elect Donald Trump, upon taking office, signed an executive order to keep it running while his administration negotiated a permanent solution.
After repeated delays of the enforcement deadline, a deal was finally announced and closed in late January 2026. The new ownership consortium is led by three managing investors: Oracle (chaired by Trump ally Larry Ellison), U.S. tech investment firm Silver Lake, and Abu Dhabi’s state-owned MGX fund. ByteDance retains a minority stake of 19.9%.
For now, American TikTok users are left waiting for the app’s update, which will present them with a new choice: grant access to their precise location and detailed AI activity, or navigate to their device settings to keep it switched off.
