What the TikTok ban means for your data
On Friday, the U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments on a case that could determine TikTok’s future in the U.S. With over 150 million Americans relying on TikTok to share creative content, build connections, and even run businesses, the possibility of a ban has left many users feeling uncertain about what comes next — and frustrated that they may lose access to years of content, hard work, and memories that they have created and curated online.
We understand how frustrating the lack of control is over not knowing whether your content will continue to be available. In fact, it’s at the heart of what we do. Data portability is about giving users control over their digital lives. No one should feel trapped or powerless when a platform changes its policies, faces regulatory issues, or shuts down entirely.
In an ideal world, you would be able to keep and move all of the data that is important to you whenever you want and wherever you want, no matter the platform it currently lives on. While we aren’t there yet, we do want to provide you with some helpful resources to help preserve your data as much as possible today — no matter what happens next.
DTI’s Portability Map
If you’re worried about how to transfer your content, with TikTok or any other online service, our Portability Map may help. It’s a resource designed to guide you through the tools available on platforms like TikTok and others, making it easier to download and protect your data. While the Portability Map is in its beginning stages and we don’t consider it to be complete at this time, we are excited to share it with you and look forward to expanding it in the near future. You can access what information Portability Map has about TikTok’s offerings here. We also encourage you to visit TikTok’s “Requesting Your Data” page, which has additional information on how to download or transfer your data.
The Portability Map is an important part of our larger mission at DTI to be a go-to resource for all things data portability. We see great value in a central hub where users can find resources to move their personal data from one service to another. By building an easy-to-use and informative repository, we strongly believe that we help people not only understand that they can move their data but also empower them to take action. Additionally, the content within Portability Map is open source (as is its code, for that matter), and we welcome contributions of suitable articles and resources on portability tools.
The Broader Portability Picture
The potential ban on TikTok is a reminder of how important it is to users to be able to preserve and move their content with data portability tools. Services go down and data becomes inaccessible, sometimes with little warning. Just recently, on December 17th, Mozilla shut down its Mastodon server, Mozilla.social. Even though Mastodon is a decentralized social platform that emphasizes user control, Mozilla’s decision to end its instance means that users who were part of Mozilla.social had to download their data and migrate their connections to another server, as Mozilla described.
The point remains the same: when companies or organizations shut down services, for whatever reason, users risk losing access to posts, messages, and connections unless they take action to save or transfer their data. It’s a reminder of the importance of data portability — and ensuring people can easily move their information to other platforms or services when something like this happens.
And while there is (really great) work being done by others, notably the Internet Archive, to help retain access to online content, these efforts can’t preserve everything. We can all do our part to help build additional tools and resources to help users transfer data easily, securely, and for any reason — including service shutdowns.
Share Your Feedback and Concerns With Us
Whether it’s navigating tools to back up your content or advocating for better portability standards, we’re committed to putting users in control of their data. We encourage you to visit the Portability Map and let us know how we can improve — and to visit DTI’s website to explore our other tools, tutorials, and advocacy efforts.
We’re excited to work with you to help build a future where users can easily move their data across platforms, ensuring that their digital lives remain intact, no matter what happens in the tech landscape.