TikTok and YouTube shares ‘Your’ Data more than any other App, Take a look at how.
February 14th, 2022 - Written By CyberLabs
TikTok is sharing User Data more than other Social Media Platform, Study Claims.
As we all know, one of the sectors that benefitted from this unfortunate pandemic is none other than our Technology industry and, when we discuss about technology the most prominent topic would be ‘Social Media’. Now to think, Two of ‘your’ commonly used social media apps could actually be collecting a lot of data on you — and you might not necessarily like what one of them is doing with it. As per a recent study, published in January by mobile marketing company URL Genius, which found that YouTube and TikTok track users’ personal data more than any other social media platform.
The above mentioned study found that YouTube, which is actually owned by Google, mostly collects a user’s personal data for it
s own purposes — such as tracking their online search history, or even the location, to serve them or rather ‘us’ relevant ads. But TikTok, which is owned by none other than, Chinese tech giant ByteDance, mostly allows third-party trackers to collect users’ data — and from there, it’s quite hard to say what happens with it. With third-party trackers, it’s essentially unimaginable 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 the physical location and any other personal information that you share with the app. As the study observed, third-party trackers can track your activity on other sites even after you leave the app.
Both YouTube and TikTok topped the other apps with 14 network contacts apiece, which is significantly higher than the study’s average number of 6 network contacts per application. And these numbers are probably higher for users who are logged into accounts on those apps, the study had noted.
Ten of YouTube’s trackers were first-party network contacts, meaning the platform was actually tracking user activity for it’s own purposes. 4 of the contacts were from third-party domains, meaning the social platform was allowing a handful of outside parties to collect this information and track user activity. And as for TikTok, the results were even more blindsiding: 13 of the 14 network contacts on the popular social media app were all from third parties. The third-party tracking still happened even when users didn’t opt into allowing tracking in each application’s settings, according to the study. The report’s authors also stated that “Consumers are currently unable to see what data is shared with third-party networks, or how their data will be used.”
In October, Wired published a guide to how TikTok actually tracks user data, including location, search history, IP address, the content you watch and how long you spend watching them. According to that guide, TikTok can “infer” personal characteristics from your age range to your gender based on the other information it collects. Additionally platforms such as, Google, Yahoo and few other sites do the same, a practice which is known as “inferred demographics.”
TikTok has been the subject of criticism in the past over how the company collects and uses data, especially from users who are young, including claims that the company has transferred some private user data to Chinese servers. As CNBC noted last year, TikTok’s privacy policy in point of fact states that the app can share user data with it’s Chinese parent company, though it claims to employ security measures to “safeguard sensitive user data.” Furthermore, In 2020, then-President Donald Trump considered to ban TikTok in the U.S. over concerns about the app’s data security policies, before current President Joe Biden walked back those threats and ordered a review of potential security threats posed by foreign-owned apps. However, neither TikTok nor YouTube immediately responded to CNBC as well.
Source:
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/05/01/how-to-stop-google-from-collecting-your-private-information.html
https://www.wired.co.uk/article/tiktok-data-privacy
https://www.tiktok.com/legal/privacy-policy-row?lang=en
