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Korean TikTok users on rise despite data leakage worries

February 19, 2025

South Korean users of the popular short-video app TikTok are on the rise despite concerns over possible data leakage, an industry data tracker said Wednesday.

The monthly active users (MAU) of TikTok and TikTok Lite, which are owned by China-based ByteDance, reached 4.89 million and 4.79 million, respectively, in Korea last month, according to the data from industry tracker IGAWorks.

TikTok Lite is a faster version of TikTok, designed for users who have less than 3 gigabytes of random access memory (RAM) or limited data.

The combined MAU of TikTok and TikTok Lite stood at 9.69 million, exceeding the 8.61 million monthly users held by Meta Platforms’ social media app Facebook here in January, the data showed.

TikTok launched its smaller version, TikTok Lite, in Korea in late 2023 amid concerns over possible user data leaks to China and the app’s addiction risks.

Most recently, TikTok parent ByteDance turned out to have shared Korean user data sent by the DeepSeek chatbot, developed by a China-based artificial intelligence (AI) startup.

South Korea temporarily suspended new downloads of DeepSeek in the country over concerns about its data collection practices.