CapCut is the video-editing tool owned by ByteDance, the developers of TikTok. While the social platform itself has been in and out of hot water with the U.S. Senate over whether or not TikTok should be banned in the USA, its video-editing tool, CapCut, is flying under the radar with its shady privacy practices. Once you read the Privacy Policy, you’ll question whether CapCut should continue being your go-to video-editing tool or not, and it might even make you question the ethics of TikTok too.
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Everything that’s wrong with CapCut’s Privacy Policy
Who even reads a Privacy Policy anyway?
Since ByteDance Ltd. is based out of Singapore, its business rules and regulations differ from the likes of North American corporations like Meta or Adobe products. Although its Privacy Policy does account for regional differences, overall, it has a much looser view of privacy compared to American expectations. If you’ve never read CapCut’s Privacy Policy, it’s about time you should acquaint yourself with it and learn what you’re signing up for.
Although CapCut’s Terms of Service states that CapCut is not intended to be used by minors below the age of 13, the fun nature of creating videos using AI tools and trending, exciting filters directly targets children, whether ByteDance intends it to or not.
Most privacy policies are long and arduous to read, difficult to obtain in full, and simply too much business or legal jargon for the average person to truly understand what they’re reading, and therefore signing up for something they may or may not actually be okay with. CapCut’s Privacy Policy is no exception.
Firstly, it’s over 30 pages long — who has the time to read all that? Answer: it should be you. You can find a regionally local version of the Privacy Policy by adding “?region=[region]” to the end of the Privacy Policy URL — for example, "?region=us" for the USA’s regional Privacy Policy. Doing this allows you to skip the irrelevant information from other regions and shortens the 30-page document into something much easier to digest.
The standard features of Privacy, plus much more scary statements…
What are you actually signing up for with CapCut?
Most users expect tracking to be used via cookies or information upload, and you’d be right to expect that from CapCut too. CapCut does retain your information about where, how, and when you created or uploaded content. While it’s not nice for the idea of privacy, it’s a standard protocol you’ll find in most software you use.
As I read through the tedious and mostly expected terms, my eyes struggling to stay focused, I reached one sentence that popped my eyeballs out of my face with shock. CapCut can collect the Gmail addresses of anyone within your email’s contact list.
While we already implore you not to use the auto-Gmail-sign-up feature — or other social accounts, for that matter — when creating accounts, this wasn’t one of the reasons that we had in mind.
CapCut can access your grandmother’s email, your boss’s email, your doctor’s email, that Tinder date from four years ago’s email. It doesn’t even state what it plans to do with this collected data, which is scarier than the thought of it being collected itself.
Without getting too much further into the detail of everything covered in the more-than-30 pages in CapCut’s Privacy Policy, I’ve revealed enough that might make you think or question how much privacy violations you’ll accept in order to use a software or not. CapCut is my favorite video-editing tool, especially for mobile, but it worries me how much information the company has and how far they can trace into my personal, professional, and private life, just based on me making a quick video for Instagram Reels.
Credit: Thanks to Kevin Bourke for the suggestion of this article.