According to Tech Digest, TikTok’s new American entity, TikTok USDS Joint Venture LLC, has updated its privacy policy to allow the collection of precise GPS data from its 200 million U.S. users. This marks a significant shift from its previous method of gathering only approximate location from IP addresses and SIM cards. The high-fidelity tracking can pinpoint exact coordinates, mirroring functionality already used in Europe and the UK to power a “Nearby Feed” for local recommendations. The company states the feature will be optional and turned off by default. In addition to location, the venture is expanding data permissions to log specific AI prompts and the physical location where AI content is created. These updates coincide with the handover of U.S. data management to Oracle, which now hosts the platform’s information on domestic servers.
The Surveillance Tightrope
Here’s the thing: this move is a perfect PR tightrope walk. On one hand, they’re moving U.S. data to Oracle’s servers, which is the big, politically-safe “national security” win they can tout to lawmakers. But on the other hand, they’re simultaneously ramping up the granularity of the data they can collect on those very servers. It’s a classic “give a little, take a lot more” scenario. Security experts are divided, and you can see why. The joint venture claims it’s all about security, but critics aren’t wrong to see it as a major step toward deeper corporate surveillance. And let’s be real, “optional and off by default” is a technicality. How many users will actually dig into their device’s location services and understand the new, precise tracking toggle versus the old, approximate one? Probably not many.
The AI and Local Advertising Play
So why do this now? The answer is in the details. They’re not just collecting location for fun. They’re explicitly tying it to AI interactions and content creation. This is a massive data goldmine for hyper-local advertising and content personalization. Think about it. If TikTok knows not just that you’re in Chicago, but that you’re standing on a specific street corner asking its AI about “good ramen spots,” the ad and content targeting becomes scarily effective. This puts them on a more level playing field with, say, Google Maps or Meta, which have long leveraged precise location for ads. The “Nearby Feed” is just the consumer-facing feature; the real product is the advertising backend they’re building. It’s a competitive necessity for them, but it comes with undeniable creep factor.
Winners, Losers, and User Agency
In the immediate landscape, the winners are clear: Oracle secures a huge, high-profile client for its cloud services, and TikTok USDS gets its “American-owned data” story. Local businesses that can afford to play in TikTok’s ad system might win with better-targeted ads. The loser, potentially, is user privacy in a broader sense. This normalizes a higher level of location tracking from a social media app. But look, the user isn’t completely powerless. The report notes you can manage this through your device’s location settings. The real question is, will TikTok make it transparent and easy to understand what you’re granting, or will it be buried in legalese? I’m skeptical. This feels like a foundational shift in their data-gathering capabilities, dressed up as a minor policy update. And once that infrastructure is in place, its uses tend to… expand.
