The Tik Tok social network, is it really a security problem?
There are those who attribute the action as a retaliation for the casualties suffered by the Indian army on June 15 at the hands of the Chinese troops, in the disputed border crossing of the Ladakh Valley.
Even though the ban wasn't just against parent company ByteDance, who are the current owners of Tik Tok, the move appears to be indirectly justified, let's see why:
On February 26 on the techcrunch.com Portal, reporter Lucas Matney, collected the statement by Reditt.com CEO Steve Huffman, who in a one-day conference called "Social 2030" held in Silicon Valley referred to the application like: "TikTok is 'fundamentally parasitic' and spyware."
Prior to this statement, at the end of 2019, the Pentagon had alerted the military branches of the United States of the use of the application by the military, which led to the use of the application on phones being prohibited. smart issued by the government to its officers and the recommendation to uninstall the app from personal phones.
Perhaps the above statement and the action taken seem unfounded, with no evidence, so we dig deeper and find an article from December 3, 2019, by the Independent.co.uk newspaper titled “TikTok is secretly loaded with Chinese surveillance software,” he says. demand".
We were able to access the lawsuit which is classified as: Case 5: 19-cv-07792-SVK Document 1 Filed 11/27/19 and is filed in the Court of the Northern District of California in the United States.
Some of the accusations presented are supported by journalistic investigations, among which stand out that: "the privacy policy of TikTok of 2018 says that the company can transfer the data of international users to China," according to the archived versions of that website. However, the company appears to have removed that clause on its updated 2019 page.
Now their privacy policies say, "We may share your information with a parent, subsidiary, or other affiliate of our corporate group." That means it would include China-based Bytedance. (CNBC Jul 25 2019 Grace Shao).
This lawsuit details the secret and unauthorized scheme of extraction and transfer of private information and biometric data of users or tiktokers, which are then used to profile and track people.
The reality is that if the allegations are verified, it probably represents major operational problems within the US.
As if this were not enough, we found that on February 27 the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) filed a lawsuit against them. alleging that they had violated the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act by Collecting and using personal information from children under the age of 13 without the required notification and consent.
The result of this procedure was: a civil fine in the amount of $ 5.7 million and precautionary measures related to the collection and destruction of personal information of children.
Despite the fact that all of the above is quite serious, we questioned it and wanted to look for more explicit evidence, it is there that Alan Friedman @wolfcallsputs of the portal phonearena.com clarifies the scenario with his report: “The beta version of iOS 14 of Apple reveals that TikTok and other applications are spying on iPhone users ”, it should be understood that this time it is evidence that is easily verified by any reader.
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This evidence is accomplished by a feature in iOS 14 that displays a banner alert for iPhone users when an app is reading a user's clipboard.
Interestingly, the feature revealed not only TikTok but also apps like AccuWeather, AliExpress, Call of Duty Mobile, Google News, Overstock, and Patreon. Jeremy Burge @jeremyburge, the "Director of Emoji" at Emojipedia posted on his Twitter account how often TikTok accessed his iPhone clipboard. Burge said that TikTok spying on the clipboard is done every time a user touches a punctuation mark or the space bar while typing.
The truth is that Tik Tok is in trouble in India and the USA. Today it has a millionaire fine, a lawsuit in process, open investigations into its acquisition in North America, use prohibitions in some sectors, as well as criticism from organizations such as " Peterson Institute For International Economics ”that makes clear the concern about the access of the data of the users of this network by the Chinese Government.
At the moment the future of Tik Tok seems complicated, its situation coincides with the download domain of this application, which means that in the middle of the storm it continues to grow.
In short, as long as it is not clear, how does the company handle the TikTokers data? (users), added to the necessary positive solution of the demand at the door, in addition to stopping all spying on its users, Tik Tok will not cease to be under the magnifying glass, since it will always be considered a security problem due to the fact of being the only Chinese social network that competes with the great North American social networks in their territory.
