Consumer Alert: What parents need to know about TikTok and teens

ROCHESTER, N.Y. — Monday’s Consumer Alert takes a look at TikTok and your teen. According to the Pew Research Center, teens spend about an hour-and-a-half on the platform every day. That worries a lot of parents.

“Exploded” is really the verb that accurately describes what our community has experienced. A TikTok video provided the proverbial instruction manual for car thieves, showing folks how easy it was to steal Kias and Hyundais.

Our photojournalist captured video in the wee hours of an April morning of teenagers in what police believed to be stolen cars driving erratically past officers, even taunting them as they leaned out of the window. This, after a TikTok video in July of 2022 taught folks how to steal Kia’s and Hyundais.

Just last week, a TikTok video went viral showing folks how to get quick cash with fake checks. We interviewed TikTok’s safety chief, Suzy Loftus, who is quick to point out TikTok’s safety features for teens, like making any accounts created by kids 13 to 15 years old private and limiting their time on the app to one hour.

“The ones that I particularly love is family pairing. I have two teenagers that use TikTok, so I pair my account with their account. And then we can sit down and review what amount of time they can be on the app,” Loftus said. “We can look at things like keyword filters — which is another safety feature. So, maybe there’s a kind of content that may not be against our community guidelines but a parent doesn’t want their teen to see that, a parent has the ability to filter that out.”

Is it safe to have the app on your phone at all? After all, TikTok is owned by a Chinese company, which means the Chinese government could have access to American users’ personal information. In April, President Biden signed a bill that will ban TikTok in the U.S. if the Chinese owners don’t sell the platform within a year.

“One of the key things that we’ve done that is voluntary and unprecedented, is work with Oracle, an American company, to store all U.S. protected user data for the last year and going forward,” Loftus said.

Here’s the problem with those parental safeguards: TikTok requires no proof of age. So, there’s nothing that keeps your teenager from lying about his or her age when they create an account.

So, we as parents have to be vigilant, routinely checking that phone to make sure your kiddo doesn’t have a second account. If you want to know all about the app and what we can do to protect our kids, here’s a link to TikTok’s Guardians’ Guide. It’s in the body of this story on our website, whec.com. And that’s your Consumer Alert.”

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