TikTok has quickly risen to fame and its use has exploded. With millions of users including massive stars like Lebron James and Bella Hadid, it has truly captured the masses. However, like most new platforms and applications, it’s not without controversy. Tik Tok data is becoming an incredibly hot topic amongst its userbase.
Allegations have come out that Tik Tok data is being sold to China. This is just the latest example of growing security concerns around the application. It has been reported that the US Government is looking into the app for potential risks. It’s a well-known fact that data from numerous social media platforms are being harvested en masse and distributed to the highest bidder, either publically through vague terms of service, or by brute force via hackers and data leaks. At any rate, the importance of data security is becoming a top priority for users.
The First of Many
TikTok clips often include people’s faces as well as locations, specifically ones that are used repeatedly. According to a pending lawsuit, the company behind the app is able to gather biometric data on every user. The same lawsuit states that once a user creates a video and moves to the next step, the created videos are relocated to numerous domains without them knowing or approval. This is all possible before the user even saves or posts content on the app. The lawsuit even states that Tik Tok is able to and currently is gathering user data including their phone contacts, email addresses, IP address, and much more.
Four teens from Illinois are currently suing Tik Tok over biometric privacy.
The parent company is allegedly concealing the ways that they’re transferring Tik Tok data. With an exponentially expanding user base, this seems to be just the beginning of security issues with the popular app and the new norm for identity theft methods.
This is only beginning of users waging war on companies that harvest valuable and deeply personal data. Users have simply become a company metric to these types of apps with blatant disregard for data privacy of any kind. Remember, if it’s free you’re paying with your data.
