Let’s play a fun game:
Which of the following 2 screenshots is TikTok’s permissions?
Is it the one that can prevent the phone from sleeping and runs at startup? The one that sends sticky broadcasts?
Or is it the one that accesses the AdId Api?
I’ll give you a hint: I already told you which one it is.
It’s the second. But the Apple App Store alerts you to it reading up browsing history, your physical address, “other user contact info” besides name, phone, email, and physical address, whatever that could mean, as well as your “other financial info” besides your payment to them, “other diagnostic data” besides crash, performance data, and app use…
Maybe this is just a matter of opinion but those few things alone are way too much. But hey, you do you.
Are you talking about the App Privacy page specifically?
Because that page is about as useful as “known to the State of California to cause cancer”
Any social media with advertising will have similar alerts as to what it might be collecting.
How would it be collecting that you might ask?
It’s not on your phone: Your browser and your apps are sandboxed from each other. They cannot read from each other. It’s a constant pain in the ass for session persistence, you end up having to use wonky nonce patterns to maintain sessions from app to browser & vice versa.
They’re collecting it from advertising ids that are on your browser. It’s the Google Ad Api - That’s it.
Go ahead, look at Instagram or Youtube. They’ll have the same laundry list of “Browsing history, Physical Address” etc.
TikTok isn’t conjuring that from thin air - It’s just that it, like any other advertising app, is using the publicly available data about you to advertise.
Again a side by side:
Which one is TikTok and which one is Instagram?
TikTok isn’t doing anything that the other apps aren’t also doing - The other apps are just fucking awful at knowing what you want to see.
I really wish I could post those pictures. I opened the “learn more” page on the App Store. It does list some of the same info under a few different headers, but I take that to mean it’s more detailed info to apply to their multiple tracking desires.
As soon as a user starts using TikTok, the company begins building a profile about them, including their interests, political leanings, sexuality, and every other variable that could impact the selection of videos they see. TikTok also collects information about users’ keystroke patterns, location information, browser history, and even biometric information (face and voice print).
https://www.thequill.ca/features/2023/2/17/five-reasons-why-tiktok-is-a-privacy-nightmare
I’m not a social media person, so I was never going to use the app anyway, but I’m also pretty strict about what apps I’ll download. It’s probably a security blanket, but I try to do what I can. I’ve changed my mind about downloading a couple of apps that required way fewer permissions. So maybe my opinion is different than others’.
