Clicking on TikTok links reveals more about you than you think

TikTok users are advising each other to be mindful of the personal information they're sharing on the site because of a feature some didn't know existed.

It's one of the most popular apps in the world and soon you'll even be able to get it in your car, because of course what drivers need when they're at the wheel is a huge distraction.

You can even find people willing to pay big money to have you watch TikToks for them and figure out what the site's latest trend is.

However, TikTok is not without opponents as there are some strong critics of the site who say it's not all it's cracked up to be.

Amid the concerns over TikTokers' well-being, the site has introduced 60-minute daily limits to users who are under 18 in an attempt to cut down on their content consumption.

Geoff Smith / Alamy Stock Photo

Then there are the legal challenges to TikTok's growing dominance, withthe US state of Montana passing a bill banning the app to prevent it from growing further in their part of the world.

Meanwhile, TikTok users have been warning each other that if they click on the wrong button it could lead to them sharing personal information with strangers without even knowing it.

Basically, if you click on a link that someone shares then they'll be told you watched whatever it was they had to share, and that means a complete stranger could find out so much more about you than you were willing to disclose.

You didn't know you'd be alerting someone to your presence and potentially giving them a pathway to learn more about you, but that's what can happen.

If there's information about yourself on your profile then anyone hopping on and having a look will be able to find it, the issue here is when you click on a stranger's link they can find your profile in the first place.

It's not difficult to stop doing this, all you really need is to go digging around in your settings to switch it off, but many TikTokers may not even have realised that people could see them.

Valiantsin Suprunovich / Alamy Stock Photo

If you go on the app and head for your privacy settings then you can tweak your 'Suggest Your Account To Others' settings to stop doing this.

People learning about this said they'd been 'surprised to learn who had clicked the link' after doing this themselves.

Topics: TikTok, Technology

Joe Harker

Joe graduated from the University of Salford with a degree in Journalism and worked for Reach before joining the LADbible Group. When not writing he enjoys the nerdier things in life like painting wargaming miniatures and chatting with other nerds on the internet. He's also spent a few years coaching fencing. Contact him via [email protected]

@MrJoeHarker