SHOCKING FACT ABOUT TIK TOK | HOW TIK TOK TRACKS YOU & YOUR DATA

Introduction

People are increasingly waking up to the fact that their personal data is being collected on social media by companies like Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat. But none of them have elicited quite the same amount of shock and horror as tik tok has. Does tik tok listen to our conversations? and if the answer is yes, what do they do with our data? “I have had instances where I would say certain things in conversations and then later that night, I would get in my feed something similar like if I talked about dogs a lot and then I’d ever weirdly start getting tik tok about dogs”. Before we answer those questions let’s establish a few things about the world’s most popular video-sharing platform.

What Is Tik-Tok?

?TikTok was launched in 2016 by a Chinese startup called bite Dance. But it’s known there by the name Douyin. It skyrocketed in popularity in 2017 when bite dance bought its rival app musically and pulled its 200 million users to its own platform. The startup was worth 140 billion dollars by mid-2020 and tik-tok alone hit 50 billion in market cap. The app hit close to 2 billion downloads in march of 2020, with 104.7 million being in January alone.?With over a billion monthly active users, mostly in Asia.

It’s no wonder that brands and companies want to capitalize on the opportunity and jump on any and every trend that comes up. Marketing may still be taking its baby steps on tik-tok, but the growing number of agencies offering big brands a hand with creating quirky content and using fun campaigns to pedal products certainly stress out the average tik-tok user. But what is the alternative? Companies have to stay relevant. “Because like you, there are like these different worlds now. like there are some people that only use tik tok so like if you’re not in tik tok you just don’t exist in the world that’s kind of how I view it”.

Accusation Of Privacy Breaches

Currently, there is no publicly available record or evidence that tik tok has passed American data to Chinese officials. China claims that all such data is stored in U.S or Singapore. And users in china cannot even access tik tok because they use their own version of the app Douyin. But this isn’t something we can verify. And it certainly doesn’t guarantee that china won’t take American data in the future.

For that though apple did catch tik tok spying on millions of iPhone users. Apple prides itself on its security and privacy features. However, the tech giant has faced its fair share of issues and vulnerabilities. The IOS 14 presented a similar problem. Specifically with the clipboard function. It turns out that any data copied to the clipboard on an IOS device could be read by any active app. There is no notification for when that happens.

There are no apps that notify you of this, it’s just a hidden vulnerability. And tik tok has actively been looking into the very same data.?One may wonder if the whole situation is being taken much too seriously. After all, we don’t have proof, are we really to give in to fear-mongering by the media?

How A Push-Up Contest Turned Into A Data Leak

In 2017 the American military joined the uber-popular video-sharing app. And some members of the U.S armed forces posted videos of push-up contests and pranks in and around their bases. It was supposed to be a moment of light-hearted boyish fun in an otherwise bleak and dangerous situation. They, however, forgot one key thing they were potentially sending data concerning their location to china.

Here’s the problem, everybody knows social media companies like Facebook and Instagram collect user data to target advertisements appropriately. This is a subject we will touch on later in the article. But the reason we mention it is that many people ask the question, what’s the difference? “So, what if tik tok is taking our data?”

“So, is Facebook” The difference is that your data is on tik-tok, not just the videos you watch. But the private messages you send and the information on your phone can be accessed by the government. “It’s just another tech company, right? Except that it’s owned by a company in china. And in China, all companies are required by law to hand over any information the government asks for.”

A simple example of this is about two decades ago. When yahoo informed the Chinese government about a citizen posting about democracy online. The individual was sentenced to 10 years in prison. The misuse of power in such circumstances is nothing less than alarming for not just America but the entire world.?

Investigations

Being one of the most popular apps in the world, undoubtedly invites a lot of scrutiny. In 2019, a student in California filed a lawsuit against tik tok for allegedly transferring private user data to servers in china. Misty hong claims that tick-tock transfers data about the phone habits of a user including what websites they visit outside the app. Hong claims that this happened before she had even made an account on the platform and that the information transmitted to china included drafts she had recorded but never published.

The suit was filed at the same time german journalist Matthias eberil found the way TikTok handles data. It turns out the information about the device and searches terms entered into the app were sent to an advertising company called AppsFlyer along with Facebook. He believes that private identifying information is transferred to an unsecured country outside of the European Union. Which may breach European data rules.

The app has also had its fair share of investigations with the U.S being worried about national security and the censorship of political content. U.S politicians are concerned that the app will siphon off data and send it to the Chinese government if the company is requested to do so. While the Senate has always been able to call in executives from companies like Google, Facebook, and Youtube. They can’t do the same for tik-tok in china.

Delete Tik-Tok?

So, should you delete tik-tok? In 2020, secretary of state, Mike Pompeo said the U.S was considering banning tik-tok. Just a few days later, Amazon also told its employees to stop using the tik-tok app on their work phones. People started to panic, even more, when celebrities like Tyler Ninja Blevins deleted the app from his phone and tweeted about it. It’s a valid panic.

Tick tock’s U.S privacy policy states that it gathers your country’s location, internet address, and the type of device you’re using. If you give it permission, it will also grab your exact location, your phone contact list, and other social network connections along with your age and phone number.?All this creates a complete picture of you that’s useful. Not only to target ads but also to understand who you are? who your friends and family are? what you like? what do you find funny? and what do you say to your friends?

It doesn’t help, either that tik-tok uses some technical measures to encode its activity. Meaning some of it is hidden from independent researchers looking under the covers. Patrick Jackson from a privacy firm called disconnect attempted to peer under the covers himself. He said that the app sends an abnormal amount of information from devices to its computers. When he opened tik-tok, he found around 210 network requests in just the first nine seconds. Totaling over 500 kilobytes of data sent from the app to the internet.

A lot of it was information regarding the device things like screen resolution and the apple advertising identifier which could be used to fingerprint your device even if you aren’t logged into your account.

In December of 2019, researchers at the checkpoint and an Israeli security firm said they found bugs in the app that could have let attackers access personal data. Which tik-tok has since said they have fixed finally. In 2019, again tick-tock paid 5.7 million dollars to the federal trade commission for violations of America’s children’s privacy law by its predecessor app musically. Which bike dance was acquired in 2017. The app now has parental controls. But some children’s advocacy groups argue that the measures they are taking are the bare minimum and they need to have stricter rules.

But here’s the truth, TikTok gathers less data than Facebook. In addition to most of the types of personal information, we saw tick-tock gathering. Facebook also tracks users across devices and inside other apps and websites. It even tracks you when you’re not using Facebook and your phone is off. Tick-tock doesn’t do that. The only difference is that tick-tock tries to hide what it’s collecting. While facebook pretty much lays it all out. Neither is an admirable trade in a company. Users would rather they didn’t take personal data at all. Facebook has also had to pay a 5 billion settlement over privacy invasions to the FTC. Which is the largest settlement in FTC history.

Conclusions

So perhaps the only way to save yourself is to never have any social media accounts, but that is hardly a realistic expectation in today’s day and age. It’s not just about entertainment. Many small businesses and creators rely on social media for their income. It’s unfair to ask people to choose between having a livelihood and protecting their personal data. But if you are concerned about your privacy and don’t rely on tik-tok for money, you do have the option of deleting the app.?

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