TikTok & AI-powered Ad Tracking

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In 2025, TikTok unveiled new AI-driven tools like Insight Spotlight and Content Suite, designed to help brands target users with unprecedented and invasive precision. However, while TikTok highlights the benefits for advertisers and engagement, the changes raise even more concerns about data harvesting, privacy, and the ethical use of user-generated content.

Background

In June 2025, TikTok announced a series of new features aimed at enhancing advertiser capabilities. These features include Insight Spotlight, which analyses user demographics, search behaviors, and viewing trends to generate AI-powered ad suggestions for brands and companies. In addition to this, Content Suite has been introduced, which filters user-generated videos mentioning a brand or product for potential conversion into advertisement. These tools, according to TikTok, will allow companies to understand “... what matters to viewers and what will make them stop and watch”. Furthermore, increase engagement with users of the application by aligning ads with real-time cultural trends. However, critics argue that the increased data harvesting and reliance on user interactions for targeted advertising deepens existing concerns about privacy, transparency, and the commodification of sensitive or socially significant movements. As TikTok already collects more than two dozen categories of user data, including personal identifiers, browsing history, and in-app activity, consumer advocates have called for greater accountability and clearer user control over how this information is gathered and used.

Community Concerns

Criticism of TikTok’s expanded advertiser tools has centered on data privacy and the overwhelming extent of information collected from users. A 2025 report by Incogni Research in August identified TikTok as the most data-hungry major social media platform, noting that it collects over two dozen categories of personal data, including names, addresses, phone numbers, financial information, in-app messages, photos, videos, browsing history, and device identifiers. Six of these categories — including names, addresses, and user-generated content — are shared with third-party entities for purposes such as targeted advertising.

These are just some of the data-categories TikTok collects from its users:

• Approximate Location
• Name
• User Identification
• Email
• Address
• Phone Number
• User Payment Information
• Other Financial Information
• Purchase History
• In-App Messages
• Photo’s
• Video’s
• Sound Recordings
• Contacts
• App Interactions
• In-App Searches
• Web-Browsing History
• Crash Logs
• Diagnostics
• Device & Other ID’s

Additionally, sharing six of these data-collects with third-party entities for numerous reasons including to assist in advertisement targeting, these include:

• Name,
• Identification (residential address and phone number),
• Photos,
• Videos,
• Sound/voice recordings
• Other user-generated content.

With the rollout of AI features like Insight Spotlight, which incorporates search history, in-app activity, and engagement patterns, advocates have raised concerns about the degree of surveillance required to fuel such tools. According to Incogni’s Head, Darius Belejevas, “Many of these apps are quietly collecting and sharing personal information like names, addresses, and approximate locations, leaving users extremely vulnerable to third-party breaches…People deserve to know how and where their information is being used, along with ways to manage or prevent that use,”.