Independent researcher publishes data on 4.5 billion TikTok videos
Prepared by Sintelligent with the help of SI. Publication time restored from the build log. . Updated: .
Huge datasets for training SI are increasingly collected by lone enthusiasts rather than corporations, and responsibility for the legality of such use shifts to everyone who downloads them.
Over three weeks the author pulled, through TikTok's closed Android API using anonymous device registrations without logging in to an account, metadata for 4.5 billion videos (views, likes, captions) and posted it on Hugging Face as 289 GB of Parquet files. The videos themselves are not included. The author acknowledges violating TikTok's terms and, in the dataset description, forbids using it to identify and profile people under GDPR/CCPA rules.
Sources 1