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TikTok Says End-To-End Encryption Makes Users Less Safe (bbc.com) 86

Posted by BeauHD from the safety-over-privacy dept.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: TikTok will not introduce end-to-end encryption (E2EE) -- the controversial privacy feature used by nearly all its rivals -- arguing it makes users less safe. E2EE means only the sender and recipient of a direct message can view its contents, making it the most secure form of communication available to the general public. Platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and X have embraced it because they say their priority is maximizing user privacy.

But critics have said E2EE makes it harder to stop harmful content spreading online, because it means tech firms and law enforcement have no way of viewing any material sent in direct messages. The situation is made more complex because TikTok has long faced accusations that ties to the Chinese state may put users' data at risk. TikTok has consistently denied this, but earlier this year the social media firm's US operations were separated from its global business on the orders of US lawmakers.

TikTok told the BBC it believed end-to-end encryption prevented police and safety teams from being able to read direct messages if they needed to. It confirmed its approach to the BBC in a briefing about security at its London office, saying it wanted to protect users, especially young people from harm. It described this stance as a deliberate decision to set itself apart from rivals. "Grooming and harassment risks are very real in DMs [direct messages] so TikTok now can credibly argue that it's prioritizing 'proactive safety' over 'privacy absolutism' which is a pretty powerful soundbite," said social media industry analyst Matt Navarra. But Navarra said the move also "puts TikTok out of step with global privacy expectations" and might reinforce wariness for some about its ownership.
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TikTok Says End-To-End Encryption Makes Users Less Safe More

TikTok Says End-To-End Encryption Makes Users Less Safe

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  • Someone should tell TikTok that their app has access to all content generated by or input into their app prior to encrypting and sending it...

  • But critics have said E2EE makes it harder to stop harmful content spreading online, because it means tech firms and law enforcement have no way of viewing any material sent in direct messages.

    "Must know everything because a small minority of people are evil and abuse the technology!"

    Just make it very difficult to decrypt, but not too difficult, let's say a week decryption time on a moderate cluster. Then it would be rather proportional and provide at least a bit of protection from harmful governments and companies.

  • As designed (Score:4)

    by Bu11etmagnet ( 1071376 ) on Wednesday March 04, 2026 @02:20PM (#66022790)

    TikTok told the BBC it believed end-to-end encryption prevented police and safety teams from being able to read direct messages

    I see this as an absolute win. [knowyourmeme.com]

  • Seatbelts make you less safe too (Score:5, Funny)

    by JoeyRox ( 2711699 ) on Wednesday March 04, 2026 @02:20PM (#66022792)
    Because they keep you in a burning car instead of ejecting you out the front windshield away from the fire.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Himmy32 ( 650060 )
      This analogy makes the opposite case than I think you are meaning... Preventing a very common situation (nonconsensual dick pics and bullying vs hitting the dashboard) but allowing a much more serious albeit infrequent event (state level actor reading messages vs dying in a fire).

  • Do all "PMs" have to be E2EE?

    It's TikTok. It's basically a video game. The games I play don't have E2EE chats.

    Makes sense with dedicated chat apps, but I dunno, maybe not everything needs to be encrypted. Just don't use this for anything sensitive. *shrug emoji*

    • Re:I dunno..it's just TikTok (Score:4, Insightful)

      by UnknowingFool ( 672806 ) on Wednesday March 04, 2026 @02:31PM (#66022808)

      Do all "PMs" have to be E2EE?

      Depends if you want the "P" not to mean "private" but "public". Sure if everyone wants their messaging to be public by all means they can do that today. Basic phone text SMS/MMS is available for many people to read. And apparently TikTok as well.

      • I wouldn't trust ANY social media platform's end to end encrypted private messages. Their definition of end to end is from you to not from you to your buddy. Social media platforms entire business model is to surveil you to create a profile to sell to advertisers and other data brokers, they aren't going to let the juicy details in PMs to under their radar. If you need private messaging choose a platform specifically designed for that and which has been vetted.
        • Like I said you are free to send SMS/MMS texts all you want. Some of us would prefer not to have our messages easily read by anyone. If you don’t want to trust any E2EE, that is your choice too.

      • It's not quite 'public', but honestly expecting 'real' privacy on someone else's platform is really a sign of low internet literacy.

        There are only a few exceptions where I expect my conversations to be 'private'.

        And even then, it's only ever as private as both parties decide, if you want to go down that hole as well.

        I don't think it would hurt anyone to highlight this and be realistic about it.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by drinkypoo ( 153816 )

      Do all "PMs" have to be E2EE?

      Only if you care about security.

      It's TikTok. It's basically a video game.

      The reason TikTok was taken over by force through the government is that it became a haven for independent journalism, especially after Leon bought Twitter and fucked it all up. Guess you don't care about that either.

      • Why are you sending anything that should be 'secure' over TikTok PMs?

        That seems foolish.

        I'd rather people understand that none of these will ever likely be truly 'secure', and operate with that assumption.

        • Sure, I agree with those things in the practical real world, but I'd also like for nobody to be allowed to call your messages private unless they're E2E'd

    • All kinds of personal information can be sent, they probably don't want to be liable.

    • Honestly? ALL electronic communication should be E2EE. Compute is cheap enough now that there's no excuse anymore.

  • May all the dicks that Tik Tok personnel suck be filled with puss.

    • May all the dicks that Tik Tok personnel suck be filled with puss.

      You're thinking of "pus". Puss is what gets filled by dicks. (Or, usually not.)

  • Why is TikTok still allowed in the country at all (Score:3, Insightful)

    by rtkluttz ( 244325 ) on Wednesday March 04, 2026 @02:25PM (#66022804) Homepage

    Even if spun off to American "ownership" the main people in the company are extensions of the CCP. It has been proven that even with just the app itself in "normal" mode that the data is used in negative to find areas of interest. Any area where no GPS tracking comes from their app causes them to dig into it to find out if it is something worth their interest. They also have the proven ability to push updates to the app to add nefarious services just the duration of the snoop then it goes back. So it never triggers malicious app on the scans even though it can be toggled for malicious usage then put back in original state very quickly. It is simply malware from the Chinese government that is wrapped in an addictive shell.

    • The only reason America wanted ownership of TikTok is to censor. The Bin Laden caught wind and they struggled to censor it. Until then the US did not care about TikTok or our privacy.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      Maybe because all the shitty US apps are the same. Facebook's app, for example, is just a wrapper around their mobile website. It can download and execute temporary services too. They know exactly where the GPS drop outs are.

      Clearly the US government is fine with it, as long as they have access to the data.

  • To be fair, TikTok is not a security focused platform, and its primary functionality doesn't need intensive E2EE. If they want to keep people safe, and mitigate abuse, dropping E2EE in this case, for their use case, that makes sense. The assertion, in general, that E2EE makes people less safe, is nonsense, and no one should ever accept baseless statement level reasoning when it's that expansive.
  • so the question everyone should be asking is "who's in charge of the state and why are they opposed to encryption?"

  • Let's remember WHY TikTok was sold (Score:5, Interesting)

    by oumuamua ( 6173784 ) on Wednesday March 04, 2026 @02:52PM (#66022862)
    Images from Gaza causing protests on US campuses: Palestine was the problem with TikTok https://www.theverge.com/featu... [theverge.com] Could that really be the reason it was sold?

    Award-winning Palestinian journalist Bisan Owda has said she has been permanently banned from TikTok, days after the social media platform was acquired by new investors in the United States.

    https://www.aljazeera.com/news... [aljazeera.com]
    So we can conclude this current change is to facilitate policing things and users they don't like on the app.

    • This issue started with the Bin Laden Letter. America wants to censor TikTok.

    • The same reason corporate media is suddenly being bought up by the right wing.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Tik Tok was an organ of CCP propaganda and influence pushing. A weapon in the war of public opinion. It was the right move to force it's sale.
  • We don't have right and wrong, true and false, anymore.
    We have ratings. Popularity. If we all agree that encryption is bad for us, then it's settled. Let's do the Trump thing, just gaslight all day long.
    I don't imagine for a microsecond that anyone using TT gives a rat's ass about encryption, knows what it's for, or have even heard of encryption.
    Speaking of rats, if you use social media, you're just a rat in a maze.
    It's amazing how your ego has been used to trap you.

    My standard advice chumps: learn guitar.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Tyr07 ( 8900565 )

      We do have right and wrong, true and false, fact and fiction.
      Only people who try to manipulate by making these things subjective say that. I.E "My truth" no, that's not how it works.
      Truth is truth, fact is fact. Opinions are just that, opinions. Yes, I know, devestating not being able to elevate an opinion to fact or truth but, it is what it is.

  • All feel less safe if their children, staff, and residents/nationals/citizens can communicate privately without approval.

    Parents may have a legitimate need to watch over communications at least for younger children. That said, your little one's best friend's 14 year old big brother is just as likely to tell your kid something in person you don't want them to hear as some stranger on the interwebs.

    Companies may have a legitimate need to make sure company secrets don't walk out the door but beyond that their

    • That said, if you have employees who are determined to hurt your company, you have an HR problem not a technical one.

      You might want to take a moment and ask why your employees are that determined to harm your company. Have they learned that your company is breaking the law or otherwise acting in harmful ways and want to put a stop to it? If so, they're whistleblowers, and may actually have your company's best interests at heart. Leaving them alone, or even helping them may well be your best choice, un

      • You might want to take a moment and ask why your employees are that determined to harm your company

        You forgot the big one: Industrial or state espionage. It is one of the big drivers behind making sure company data doesn't walk out the door when it's not supposed to.

        As to why people do this: The usual reason - money.

  • Propaganda (Score:5, Interesting)

    by CAIMLAS ( 41445 ) on Wednesday March 04, 2026 @03:10PM (#66022908)

    This is a propaganda agitprop hit piece. There's no truth in it of meaning.

    No, Tiktok is (by self admission) not using end-to-end encryption. Guess what, though? Neither does Facebook, Instagram, or X, for that matter. This is provable by simply observing how ads track the private conversations you're having.

    There are confirmed cases now on X of users who're having private conversations negative to Israel suddenly having Google Trends results for their real (verified) names from Tel Aviv. People regularly get ads related to chat conversations on Facebook and Instagram.

    These platforms are all designed from the onset as a panopticon. Don't kid yourself.

  • Of course it makes you less safe. When you use it, the government will know you're using it, and that automatically makes you guilty of something, so expect those jack books kicking your door in at 3:00 AM.

  • lulzsec existed for a reason

    you can't secure systems that are deliberately made to be insecure and it's retarded to think otherwise

    you want secure tech, make it right. oh look it's illegal to do that, backdoors are mandated in all commercial products. So either someone has a monopoly on actual security - and there's no reason to assume they've succeeded in that endeavour - or it's all just an open fuckfest of lies. People with money jockeying for position, for the right to make more money. Tarded.

  • Why should E2EE be controversial? It is pretty much standard for any good messenger.

    • Because privacy is something only Bad Guys(tm) want. You're not a Bad Guy(tm), are you?

      • If you've got nothing to hide, you've got nothing to fear. You don't have anything to hide, right, citizen?

        • I'm all for privacy and healthy mistrust of business and government, but funnily enough that's sort of true. Scammers will very quickly try to direct the conversation to Signal or WhatsApp precisely because the E2EE stops those companies doing large-scale detection of their activity and shutting them down.

          In the end TikTok is not primarily a messaging platform. The video content is public, and of that there is enough spam content (fake Musk investment videos and so on). I imagine one of their reasons to avo

    • Because when it comes to social media platforms E2E is not you to your buddy. Its you to the platform. Their entire business model is to surveil you and they aren't going to give up the juicy details that get exchanged in PMs. Use a dedicated private messaging platform whose E2EE has been vetted if you actually need private mesaging. Or encrypt the msg in a 3rd party application like PGP/GPG before pasting it in a chat of unknown security.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by allo ( 1728082 )

        The second E means, that you encrypt to the *end*. When you encrypt to the platform, it is transport (layer) encryption. And yeah, with working E2EE the platform can't read your messages. But that may make the feature unattractive for the platform, but not controversial for the users.

  • If we gave our users encryption then we couldn't spy on them!

  • This isn't "impossible" to solve. Just not the way they want to.

  • Get a new computer, log in the WhatsApp / messenger/ etc, all your past messages are then decrypted, that means the required cryptography keys are held on their serversâ¦

  • "We need to be able to spy on you for your own protection."

    • What do you expect from a Chinese-founded company that pimps  data directly to CCP spyboiz. I'd cut them off at the neez and take great joy at their American investors whining.

  • 1. There's no such thing as a system where only White Hats get to see stuff. If the "good guys" can see something, then you must necessarily assume everyone can.

    2. The "good guys" have a nasty habit of only being "good" when they feel like it. You cannot rely on them actually having any ethics or integrity, as has been demonstrated in just about every country on Earth far far too many times.

    3. The "bad guys" sometimes turn out to actually be "good guys" (Manning and Snowden both revealed important informati

  • Who uses TikTok for messaging? (Score:3)

    by DMDx86 ( 17373 ) on Wednesday March 04, 2026 @08:18PM (#66023588) Journal

    TikTok is more oriented around interacting with a feed full of algorithmically-selected videos from various creators you don't know rather than being a social network where you seek out specific users and add them to your friends / circle and chat with them regularly. I get that there might be some people who use TikTok like the latter, but I'm doubting that's super common.

    So regardless of any ulterior motives behind shunning E2EE, who does this really affect in the scheme of things?

  • "I'm from the Government, and I'm here to help." -Ronald Reagan

  • That's why they won't allow it!

  • And do NOT think of the mafia-esque clans of the CCP!! This is to protect allllll the children!

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