Delete TikTok.
How many of these stories have to surface before Americans stop handing over their private data to our biggest opponent on the world stage? In a recent Drill Down article, we sounded the alarm on the security risks involved in the popular social media app, citing a recent NYT article.
“TikTok, the Chinese-owned video app, said…that it was moving all of the data produced by its American users through servers controlled by Oracle, the Silicon Valley company, in a bid to convince the U.S. government that it will not expose the personal information of Americans to the Chinese government,” the New York Times reports.
But there is a very. big. catch.
“TikTok added that it would still store its own backups of that information, potentially complicating those efforts.”
So, China is storing backups of TikTok data. What kind of data? A new report from Breitbart News gives us an idea of the kind of information China is taking from your phone while you’re participating in the latest TikTok challenge.
“TikTok has confirmed that it has the ability to monitor the activity of users when browsing the web via the platform’s in-app browser. TikTok can monitor the keystrokes that users type and what they click on in a web page inside the in-app browser, meaning TikTok could capture a user’s credit card information or passwords,” Breitbart reports.
Ready to delete TikTok?
From Forbes:
“This was an active choice the company made,” said Felix Krause, a software researcher based in Vienna, who published a report on his findings Thursday. “This is a non-trivial engineering task. This does not happen by mistake or randomly.” Krause is the founder of Fastlane, a service for testing and deploying apps, which Google acquired five years ago.
TikTok has confirmed that those privacy-violating features exist in the code —but they aren’t used. Here’s what a TikTok spox is saying:
“Like other platforms, we use an in-app browser to provide an optimal user experience, but the Javascript code in question is used only for debugging, troubleshooting and performance monitoring of that experience — like checking how quickly a page loads or whether it crashes,” spokesperson Maureen Shanahan said in a statement.
So they absolutely can steal your data because they have admitted that code and those features exist, and the backup servers for everything live in China.
Again, delete TikTok.
