Zero privacy: TikTok is the social network that shares your data the most!
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A study conducted thanks to a new feature from Apple
Monday, December 13, 2021, Apple unveiled its iOS 15.2 update. Among other things, it spawned a new app activity logging feature, which lets you see if apps are leaking your data. The specialized site URL Genius took the opportunity to a battery of tests on different application categories (shopping, books, business, music, etc.)
On the social networks side, the result is without appeal. YouTube and TikTok sit proudly ahead of all the others, thanks to a total of 14 contacts made with other networks.
There is a difference between the two. If YouTube seems to return most of its data to its own domain, in particular for the proper functioning of the Google service (history, location, etc.), this is not the case of the Chinese social network. Apple’s analysis shows that 13 of his 14 contacts refer to third-party domains. In other words, it is difficult to know where the data is going, or even to know what this data is.
At the bottom of the ranking, we are surprised to find Facebook and Snapchat, as well as WhatsApp. The Telegram social network, for its part, privileged for a few years for its secure aspect, displays no less than nine contacts, all intended for third-party domains.
In conclusion of its analysis, the site URL Genius writes that “The findings raise important questions about the fit between consumer perceptions and the potential behavioral tracking that still takes place when tracking permission is not granted. »
China’s personal data empire
Distrust of Chinese technologies is not new. When he was still president, Donald Trump had tried to shut down TikTok in the United States, or to force its parent company ByteDance to sell its application to American companies like Microsoft. It did not come to fruition and was not pursued by the Biden administration.
However, the wall street journal reported on February 2 that “the Department of Commerce [américain] proposes a rule to expand restrictions on Chinese applications”, TikTok was a reference here. The idea is simple: expand federal oversight to explicitly include apps that could “be used by foreign adversaries to steal or otherwise obtain data. »
The newspaper went so far as to assure that “TikTok only needs one important piece of information to know what you want: how long you dwell on content. »
The Chinese company has always denied transmitting data to the Chinese government. According to him, it would therefore be exclusively commercial practices.
To infinity and beyond ?
In one 2019 Digital Century articlewe could read that Byte Dance, parent company of TikTok, “generates a lot of revenue through machine learning-based content distribution platforms. » Another strength of the Chinese giant, which goes hand in hand with machine learning, happens to be artificial intelligence. All of this research is based primarily on the analysis of human behavioral data. It is therefore logical that TikTok represents a real gold mine of information for the development of side projects.
At a time when Facebook is becoming Meta and rapidly developing its parallel universe in virtual reality, TikTok is also working on its own filter and augmented reality tools, which will undoubtedly allow it to collect ever more data.
