ByteDance Allegedly Trained "For You" Algorithm Using Content Scraped without Consent from Other Social Platforms

January 15, 2017

ByteDance allegedly scraped data (videos, usernames, profile pictures, descriptions) from Instagram, Snapchat, and other platforms without consent. This unauthorized collection was used to enhance the 'For You' algorithm's effectiveness on American users within Flipagram, ByteDance's predecessor. Such practices raise concerns about safe and secure AI governance, underscoring the need for robust harm prevention measures in AI development.

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Matched TAIM controls

Suggested mapping from embedding similarity (not a formal assessment). Browse all TAIM controls

MEASURE 2.10 — similarity 0.659, rank 1. TAIM detail and related incidents →
MAP 1.6 — similarity 0.656, rank 2. TAIM detail and related incidents →
MAP 4.1 — similarity 0.650, rank 3. TAIM detail and related incidents →

Alleged deployer: bytedance
Alleged developer: bytedance
Alleged harmed parties: instagram-users, snapchat-users, american-social-media-users

Source

Data from the AI Incident Database (AIID). Cite this incident: https://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/190

Data source

Incident data is from the AI Incident Database (AIID).

When citing the database as a whole, please use:

McGregor, S. (2021) Preventing Repeated Real World AI Failures by Cataloging Incidents: The AI Incident Database. In Proceedings of the Thirty-Third Annual Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence (IAAI-21). Virtual Conference.

Pre-print on arXiv · Database snapshots & citation guide

We use weekly snapshots of the AIID for stable reference. For the official suggested citation of a specific incident, use the “Cite this incident” link on each incident page.