TikTok Shares Your Data More Than Any Other Social Media App, Study Says

According to a recent study published by mobile marketing company URL Genius, YouTube and TikTok track users' personal data more than any other social media apps. However, while YouTube mostly collects your personal data for its own purposes to serve you more relevant ads, TikTok mostly allows third-party trackers to collect your data -- "and from there, it's hard to say what happens with it," reports CNBC. From the report: With third-party trackers, it's essentially impossible to know who's tracking your data or what information they're collecting, from which posts you interact with -- and how long you spend on each one -- to your physical location and any other personal information you share with the app. As the study noted, third-party trackers can track your activity on other sites even after you leave the app.

To conduct the study, URL Genius used the Record App Activity feature from Apple's iOS to count how many different domains track a user's activity across 10 different social media apps -- YouTube, TikTok, Twitter, Telegram, LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, Messenger and Whatsapp -- over the course of one visit, before you even log into your account. YouTube and TikTok topped the other apps with 14 network contacts apiece, significantly higher than the study's average number of six network contacts per app. Those numbers are all probably higher for users who are logged into accounts on those apps, the study noted.

Ten of YouTube's trackers were first-party network contacts, meaning the platform was tracking user activity for its own purposes. Four of the contacts were from third-party domains, meaning the social platform was allowing a handful of mystery outside parties to collect information and track user activity. For TikTok, the results were even more mysterious: 13 of the 14 network contacts on the popular social media app were from third parties. The third-party tracking still happened even when users didn't opt into allowing tracking in each app's settings, according to the study. "Consumers are currently unable to see what data is shared with third-party networks, or how their data will be used," the report's authors wrote.

The "user" is the product

[bookwormT3]

What does privacy matter when there's great stuff to watch, right?

Re:

[Aighearach]

Are you sure "great stuff" is part of the formula here?

Re:The "user" is the product

[systemd-anonymousd]

Great stuff--as determined by the CCP

Re:

[AmiMoJo]

Have you ever been on TikTok? The content there is definitely not CCP sanctioned.

That's basically China's trade offer. They won't try to impose their values on countries they trade with, which they promote as a benefit compared to trading with the EU or US.

Re:

[Paxtez]

The theory is that the content is curated/guided by the CCP because it is stuff they wouldn't sanction. They boost content that is "bad" because we use it and people in China can't.

  - People acting "correctly" or showing positive traits = bury / discourage this behavior in the US.
  - Dangerous trends, controversial content, random sexy things = boost / encourage in the US.

As far as conspiracy theories go, that sounds like it would be totally viable.

Re:

[AmiMoJo]

That's pretty out there, as conspiracy to theories go.

No it doesn't

[registrations_suck]

I doubt it shares much of my data, since I don't use it. Or any other social media app.

Nevertheless, don't confuse "your data" with "data about you". YOUR DATA is yours. DATA ABOUT YOU isn't.

Re:

[xalqor]

And yet disclosure of both kinds can be invasive to privacy, if the subject of the information doesn't know it's being collected. It's especially invasive if the subject wouldn't have agreed to it, which you don't know unless you obtain consent interactively. A mention in the terms of service doesn't count.

Re: Trump wanted...

[shm]

India banned it for political reasons.

Re: Trump wanted...

[gurps_npc]

People like to think that "political reasons" is a bad word. It just means "citizens of the country wanted to do this". In other words, when people do things for political reasons they are doing the RIGHT thing, not a wrong thing.

What people generally mean when they say 'political reasons' is actually "partisan reasons", or more clearly, 'partisan politics'. This means the action was taken to please only members of your part, not the country in general.

Example: "Biden decided to appoint a black female Supreme Court Judge for partisan reasons" and "Trump appointed 3 Anti-abortion Supreme Court Judges for partisan reasons". While most of the country is divided on these issues, their respective parties demanded these actions.

Politics is not evil, but partisan politics can be evil. It means you are putting the desires of your party above the needs of the country. It would have been better if both Biden and Trump had picked the best judges irrespective of these partisan issues.

As it is, we can only hope the partisan politics will eventually cancel itself out (hard to do because McConnel stole Obama's Judgeship and gave it to Trump - for partisan reasons).

Re:

[AmiMoJo]

The problem is not the players, it's the rules of the game. The US system inevitably leads to two party, partisan politics.

You can actually see politicians struggling against it. In both the Democratic and Republican parties there are people on different parts of the political spectrum, fighting for internal control. If the system allowed for more than two parties, both the Democrats and Republicans would be split into at least 3 smaller parties each, and governments would be a coalition of them.

Re:

[gurps_npc]

I agree. The truth is we should not give all the judges to the President.

Instead, allow the top three political parties each to appoint one third of the judges. Not just talking Supreme court, this should apply to regular judges and appeals judges as well as the court of last resort.

We could even restrict appeals court judges to those were appointed to a different party and require all Supreme court judges to have spent at least a year as an Appeals court judge.

Re:

[DontBeAMoran]

I will remember that. Don't vote for a kid who just storms out of Parliament.
You know who I'm talking about, JUSTIN!

Duh, it's Chinese so it's bad.

[Anonymous Coward]

Twitter/Meta/Google share just as much but they are American so they are the good guys.

Re:

[diffract]

"We couldn't buy TikTok, let's put some negative media about it"

So it is a good thing?

[junglee_iitk]

So is it a good thing that you are directly tracked by advertisement agency? It woud be better if TikTok was not a video platform but an advertisement delivery platform which owned a monopoly on video deliveries?

Next in news: It is better if Microsoft has a monopoly via Internet Explorer because if it was also an advertisement agency.

Re: So it is a good thing?

[RegistrationIsDumb83]

Advertising sucks, but it's not quite as nefarious as being tracked by the CCCP.

Re:

[junglee_iitk]

Being tracked by CCP is a blessing bigger than being tracked by anybody else in the world except Russia. You know why? Because CCP can't do shit, neither do Russia where I live.

And where you live.

This is literally anti-China propaganda americans are just as dumb as they were 20 years ago trying to justify war on Iraq.

Re:

[Miles_O'Toole]

The government of China is an advertising agency? Beijing Cooper, perhaps?

China is a socialist country...

[LordHighExecutioner]

...so they just want to socialize YOU!

Re: China is a socialist country...

[rantrantrant]

Well, you're just being plain antisocial with that attitude!

GDPR lawsuit...

[rantrantrant]

...,coming their way in 10, 9, 8, 7...

Re: GDPR lawsuit...

[spinitch]

FB and their arch rival might need to team up to defend their intrusion business model.

Re: TikTok is even more idiotic than Facebook

[rantrantrant]

There's also a reason why we regulate harmful things like alcohol, tobacco & gambling. Some people need protecting from them selves. It tends to work out better for the whole of society.

Poor metric

[cmseagle]

The metric used for "sharing data more" is the number of tracking domains the app communicates with. That's a poor metric and barely tells you what the article claims that it does. How many trackers the data is sent to matters far less than the quantity of data collected.

There are no data presented

[jbmartin6]

All this study [urlgeni.us] does is look at third party domains an app contacts. The raw data aren't presented, unless I missed the links somewhere. Then the article/summary makes some huge assumptions. The study is careful to use the term 'potential tracker.' There's an assumption that the authors know which domains are owned or run by whom, so they can say YouTube mostly contacts first party domains but TikTok doesn't. It's also possible that the authors don't know which Chinese domain does what for whom, or which are owned by ByteDance. There's also a huge assumption that we know what is done with data collected by the first party domains used by YouTube. Still, you won't catch me with TikTok on my primary smartphone.

Of course it does.

[doubledown00]

I'm not a Trump fan at all and think most of what he did during his administration was grift. I was also against the forced "sale" of Tik Tok during that whole debacle. But as more information comes out I do have to admit that he identified a potential problem there. Now whether that was because he had good information or was merely because anything from China is "bad" is anyone's guess.

I suppose a good start to resolving some of this would be more stringing reporting / disclosure requirements on what is

DuckDuckGo's App Tracking Protection

[Klaxton]

I installed it on my phone and wow, very surprised at how many tracking attempts are blocked, even from apps I rarely use. Right now it is reporting 8,681 attempts from 19 apps in the past week, and it shows how many from which ones. If you have an Android phone I highly recommend getting on the waiting list.

https://www.ghacks.net/2021/12... [ghacks.net]

TikTok should be banned

[slazzy]

Just as China bans YouTube, Facebook, Google etc.

Re:

[slazzy]

Sorry, nobody reads what anonymous Chinese cowards have to say.

Snaptik Tiktok

[gr3web]

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