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"TikTok is a data collection service that is thinly-veiled as a social network"


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3 minutes ago, CrazyButItFeelsAllright said:

Your own people banned it :lessons: there goes your Tik Tok :lessons: unless you don’t live in India, but I’m sure I saw on a comment somewhere you said you do, but if you don’t then your Tik Tok survives (for now) :demi:

I am Indian but i live somewhere else. So yeah, tik tok thriving here :demi:

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I'm from Gen Z so literally all of my friends use it. I downloaded it for like 3 days before I started thinking "hmm, this s.hit is actually dumb as f.uck"/"hmm, I'm pretty sure this s.hit is stealing my information". :ponderney:

I guess I can understand the appeal of it? It's like Vine, except nowhere near as iconic or funny. The thing that actually makes me mad though is when it was known as the Musical.ly app, everyone hated it. I mean, everyone. And yet, when it got rebranded as TikTok, suddenly everyone was on it. Makes no sense. :calculating:

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On 7/1/2020 at 10:18 AM, Jordan Miller said:

tiktok.jpg.a694e5d345e01cf1d6159ad9f6d5af4e.jpg


TikTok users, beware. A Redditor reverse-engineered the TikTok app and claims they figured out how the app works.

They write:

TikTok is a data collection service that is thinly-veiled as a social network. If there is an API to get information on you, your contacts, or your device... well, they're using it.

  • Phone hardware (cpu type, number of course, hardware ids, screen dimensions, dpi, memory usage, disk space, etc)
  • Other apps you have installed (I've even seen some I've deleted show up in their analytics payload - maybe using as cached value?)
  • Everything network-related (ip, local ip, router mac, your mac, wifi access point name)
  • Whether or not you're rooted/jailbroken
  • Some variants of the app had GPS pinging enabled at the time, roughly once every 30 seconds - this is enabled by default if you ever location-tag a post IIRC
  • They set up a local proxy server on your device for "transcoding media", but that can be abused very easily as it has zero authentication

They add: " They have several different protections in place to prevent you from reversing or debugging the app as well. App behavior changes slightly if they know you're trying to figure out what they're doing. There's also a few snippets of code on the Android version that allows for the downloading of a remote zip file, unzipping it, and executing said binary. There is zero reason a mobile app would need this functionality legitimately."

You can read their thread in-full on Reddit.

It's worth mentioning India just banned TikTok and 58 other Chinese-produced apps because of issues with data mining.

Social media giants stealing your information we been knew. :sippinga:

This is why I've never had TIKTOK and  why I will never have it! :)

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