In this video, I break down what changed after the TikTok USDS joint venture and why the “safer American TikTok” narrative doesn’t match what users actually experienced. I walk through who’s really behind the new ownership structure—ByteDance at 19.9%, with the remaining 80.1% tied to major investors like Oracle (Larry Ellison), Silver Lake, and Abu Dhabi’s MGX—and why that immediately raised trust and censorship concerns for a platform used by roughly 170 million Americans. Then I get into the part that should make any privacy-minded person pause: the updated privacy policy. I show how TikTok now explicitly acknowledges collecting extremely sensitive identity data (race/ethnicity, religion, health, sexual orientation, gender identity, and even citizenship/immigration status), plus aggressive device and behavior tracking like keystroke patterns, clipboard data, and cross-device activity. I also explain how computer vision turns your photos and videos into biometric and environmental data, and why TikTok admitting it collects data even from drafts and pre-upload activity means there’s effectively no “private” space inside the app. The takeaway is simple: this version of TikTok looks less like entertainment and more like a surveillance tool—so lock down your settings, limit what you share, and stop assuming “drafts” are off-limits.