How you can Safeguard your Children On TikTok

At the start of this month, one Lincolnshire head teach was forced to contact parents after a shocking incident on TikTok. An account claiming to be an official account for West Gate Academy was contacting children requesting them to ‘audition’ in their school uniforms.  

TikTok themselves have been under fire for their data protection practices. According to a 2020 report for Business Insider, TikTok were found to have been illegally recording the data of minors without consent. 

With 18% of TikTok users being under the age of 18, these are worrying stories that seem unlikely to be isolated incidents. As children are so confident using social media, they are often unaware of the risks, thinking they know best.  

This is why we’ve put together the following digital safety tips to help you help your children to be safer on TikTok. 

Enable Parental Controls 

The first thing you should do to help protect your children is set up the parental controls. Parental controls allow multiple features that can help manage your child's experience: 

Screen Time Management – You can limit time spent on the app to between 40 – 120 minutes per day 

Restricted Mode – This mode adds filters to the content stream which means children shouldn’t be exposed to inappropriate content, however, this isn’t guaranteed. There is still potential to see age-inappropriate content.  

Family Pairing – This setting means that you can control the account settings for your child's account remotely from your own account. This can also be used to disable the direct messaging feature.  

One thing to bear in mind is that children can easily set up another account using a new email address to bypass the parental controls. We’d always advise establishing a dialogue so that your child understands the potential dangers. 

Monitoring Activity 

The only way to filter content is by using the Restricted Mode mentioned above. However, taking steps to monitor their activity can help you filter out any unwanted content.  

TikTok advise that parents of younger children who are interested in signing up, initially share an account. This means you can see exactly what they are posting, commenting on etc. Of course, this isn’t fool proof and there is always resistance, particularly amongst older children who crave independence. 

In these instances, we’d suggest familiarising yourself with the content creators your children follow. This way you can see exactly what they’re seeing and be mindful of anything you consider inappropriate.  

Account Privacy 

Making a TikTok account private is one of the best ways to manage a child's security online. Turning the privacy settings on means that you can control who can comment and message a user and limit contact with strangers. 

To set an account to private it's simply a matter of opening the settings and toggling the account as private or public. To ensure you have control of this, privacy settings can be managed using the Family Pairing mode. 

Should you be concerned? 

The US military and FBI have been particularly vocal about their mistrust of TikTok. They strongly believe that TikTok’s parent company (ByteDance), which is based on China, is utilising the app to spy on users in foreign states. Unsurprisingly, TikTok strongly dispute these claims and as of yet, there is no proof that TikTok is selling your information to the Chinese government. 

Despite the hype in the media about TikTok’s apparently lax security and suspect practices, a lot of this is hearsay. An investigation by the Washington Post found that the security practices of TikTok were in fact not all that much different to most other social media sites. 

For more information about how Personnel Checks background screening solutions can aid your organisation, get in touch! You can give us a call on 01254 355688 or drop us an email at letstalk@personnelchecks.co.uk