TikTok’s American operations are entering a new phase under a recently finalized joint venture with US investors, and one of its first moves has been to broaden the kinds of personal data it can gather.
A freshly published privacy policy confirms that the platform may now “collect precise location data, depending on your settings,” a marked change from its earlier limit to “approximate” location tracking.
The timing of the change coincides with the formal separation of TikTok’s US business from direct control by its Chinese parent, ByteDance.
The deal, completed last week, places the US branch under TikTok USDS Joint Venture LLC, a consortium that includes Oracle, Silver Lake, and Abu Dhabi’s MGX. ByteDance will keep just under a 20 percent stake.
While TikTok has said the new measures comply with all relevant privacy laws, the update signals a clear expansion in what the company can access about users’ whereabouts.
Americans using TikTok can disable the feature through device settings, and the company says location sharing will remain optional and disabled by default when the change takes effect.
Previously, the app drew only on information such as IP addresses and SIM data to estimate where users were located, avoiding direct GPS collection. That approach was spelled out in TikTok’s 2024 US privacy policy, which explicitly stated that even approximate GPS coordinates were not being recorded from American users. The new venture appears poised to alter that boundary.
In the U.K. and Europe, TikTok already gathers precise location information to support a “Nearby Feed,” which recommends local businesses and events. The same system is expected to arrive in the US, though no rollout date has been announced.
The revised policy also broadens what the company can record about how people use its artificial intelligence features.
Prompts entered by users and metadata about when and where AI-generated material is created will now be included in TikTok’s US data collection.
Oracle, which chairs the new partnership and manages the platform’s American data infrastructure, said the algorithm guiding TikTok’s recommendations “will be secured in Oracle’s US cloud environment.”
The company added that it will handle retraining of the algorithm using existing US user data. Oracle’s chairman, Larry Ellison, has previously made these thoughts about user data and privacy known.
That agreement caps years of political tension between Washington and Beijing. In 2024, US lawmakers passed legislation ordering ByteDance to divest TikTok’s US assets or face a national ban by early 2025. President Trump repeatedly extended the enforcement deadlines, allowing the venture to be finalized this week.
The new policy may reassure regulators that control over US user data is being localized, but it also gives TikTok broader rights to gather personal information within US borders.
