Tiktok & Youtube shares personal data - and it’s unclear where it goes.
A recent study found that Youtube and TikTok track users’ personal data more than any other social media apps. Findings come from journalist Tom Huddlestone Jr. of CNBC. According to the study mostly 3rd party data tracking was prevalent with TikTok and mainly 1st party tracking happened with YouTube. Youtube mainly collects data for their own purposes for relevant advertisement, however, TikTok (owned by Chinese tech gian ByteDance) mostly allows 3rd party trackers to collect your data and from there it’s hard to say what happens to it. Probably the most concerning one being TikTok, let’s dive deeper into what this may mean.
Huddlestone writes:
“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.”
It’s important to note that all of this information was collected before an account was set up with any social media app, it was tracked using the Record App Activity feature from Apple’s iOS to count how many different domains track a user’s activity. Which begs the question, what information is tracked once someone is signed up on social media pages or apps?
According to a Wired guide on how TikTok tracks user date, TikTok can “infer” personal characteristics from your age range to your gender based on the other information it collects. Google and other sites do the same thing, a practice called “inferred demographics.” What’s even more alarming is from the same article Huddlestone writes “the app can share user data with its Chinese parent company, though it claims to employ security measures to ‘safeguard sensitive user data.’” So where is your information going? The short story is we don’t know and that’s why Mi-Token advises you to stay aware and alert about the security risks involved in your everyday lifestyle.