Revised 7 August 2026
The claim below that TikTok scores 4 on Control no longer holds, and it was the weaker half of the argument. Account deletion is four clicks counted from the home screen, one to the profile and three from there, where this piece counted from the first settings screen and made it two to three. Facebook’s six clicks and LinkedIn’s three are both counted from the home screen, so TikTok is now counted the same way, and it scores 2. Nothing about TikTok has been shown to change. The count was inconsistent with the rest of the index. TikTok is now 9 out of 20.
Revised 6 August 2026: the Clarity scores below were remeasured with a published tool rather than a web editor, and the thresholds were recalibrated because the originals put every privacy policy in the same box. Facebook is now 10 out of 20. The reasoning on this page is left exactly as it was published, because rewriting an argument after the fact is worse than dating it. Current numbers are on the scores page.
The Data Human Index in Practice: Facebook and TikTok
I’ve been promising to show the Index at work, so here’s what that actually looks like.
I scored two brands: Facebook and TikTok. Private browser window, logged out for Consent, Transparency, and Empathy, logged in for Control. I recorded only what I could observe: no assumptions and no inside access.
Both landed at 12 out of 20 and both sit in the Compliance-bound band. Looking at the scores, they seemed identical.
But then I looked at the shapes and the story got a lot more interesting.
The Index scores five dimensions (Transparency, Consent, Clarity, Control, and Empathy) each on a scale of 0 to 4.
Facebook scored 4 on both Transparency and Clarity. Its privacy policy is one click from the homepage, written at a Grade 9 reading level, with plain-language summaries throughout. It’s genuinely one of the most readable policies I’ve seen from a social media company.
However, it scored 1 on both Consent and Control. For Consent: no cookie banner on first load, no opt-out for a logged-out visitor, and the only path to ad preferences runs through a Help Centre article, a login wall, and seven steps. That’s not consent. That’s deflection. For Control: account deletion requires six clicks through a nested settings architecture.
TikTok scored 0 on Consent, the only brand in the dataset so far to receive a zero on any dimension. No banner, no notice, and no opt-out of any kind. Data is collected from a first-time visitor before they’ve agreed to anything.
But TikTok scored 4 on Control as account deletion is two to three clicks from the first settings screen. It’s the most accessible deletion path I’ve observed across any brand scored so far.
What does this all mean?
Facebook tells you everything clearly, then makes it as hard as possible to act on any of it. The information is there, but the power is not.
TikTok — the platform that carries the most public suspicion around data practices — makes it easier to leave than almost anyone else. But it collects your data before you’ve agreed to anything.
That’s exactly why the shape matters more than the number.
The full scoring breakdown is on Brand Scores Behind the Scores: every dimension, every score, and every piece of evidence behind it. There’s also an interactive tool where you can score any brand yourself in about twenty minutes.
Next up: Apple. It scores where you’d expect on almost every dimension. Almost.