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Wow, that headline is clickbait nonsense, and the article make numerous . They do not have access to "all user data", that is blatantly false, even in the arti
by olliej 5y ago
Wow, that headline is clickbait nonsense, and the article make numerous .
They do not have access to "all user data", that is blatantly false, even in the article's own claims.
> “Once one advertiser has a device ID that’s correlated, all privacy is gone,”
What? That's only a single Ad network, and no one has the scope of surveillance google has (and uses) except maybe Facebook.
Likewise, they do not have access to keychain data - they use keychain sync to link a user across multiple devices (the whole point of keychain sync is to sync data across multiple devices) - keychain does not provide arbitrary access to any app, and even if they had raw access to the local keychain db file[s] it's encrypted. It's probably worth adding an easy way to remove an app's keychain data (this would be an entirely UI feature).
The various device ID methods used are likewise the standard scummy ad industry practices that all the "freemium" apps use, and many of the ones you pay for as well.
It changes the way it behaves using javascript etc. Presumably it's just another WebView app, so that kind of goes without saying, and is again not unique to TikTok.
"On the Apple app, the studies indicated TikTok made its own version of a video player presumably to ensure the code runs properly — but Lockerman said it’s also likely used to hide things"
Wow. Just wow.
Anyway, this seems like yet another china-bogeyman article making absurdly broad claims about the breadth of data collected while describing the much more limited techniques they're actually using. Essentially it's is trying very hard to act like what TikTok is doing is somehow worse or more nefarious than other companies (e.g. google and Facebook).
While there may be actual legitimate concerns about TikTok, articles like this undermine the credibility of actual researchers.