Ultimately I think it’s no secret that TikTok has about as much respect for privacy as the Chinese government does for democracy.
By the way, you should expect any Chinese company or any company that wants to operate in China to share data with, or follow directions from, the CCP. For example, Google was asked to sensor searches about the tiananmen square massacre.
So the Chinese government has allowed for and has encouraged Chinese firms to actually engage in national security data audits of any data that’s being gathered by a Chinese firm. Now, TikTok, which has a parent company in ByteDance, which is based in Beijing, is subject to those same national security data audits because it shares data with its parent company, ByteDance.
Tik Tok is just objectively a pathetic and horrible thing. It promotes the absolute worst behavior from people while siphoning all their data and manipulating how people think and behave. It is evil, and I refuse to use it.
So, both of these articles you’ve shared here are about the same matter as the article that Rustacean shared earlier in this thread. What TikTok did was to exploit the metadata of two journalists in an unsuccessful attempt to identify suspected leakers of corporate information. Again, I think it’s sensationalistic to characterize this as TikTok “spying” on journalists. In the end, I think that TikTok handled this situation about as well as it could have.
To date, I don’t see any reason to believe that TikTok is more privacy-invasive than NSA PRISM partners such as Facebook and YouTube, or Twitter.
My approach to social media is to only post information that I wouldn’t mind being made public (because it some day might) and to minimize the amount of metadata that I share. For example, I don’t share my devices’ location data or share my contacts with social media companies.
I’m not trying to convince you of anything, you’re free to do with this info as you please. Honestly this part that I quoted is pretty much laughable. If you don’t think that a company that admits to spying on users is spying on users that says more about your understanding of how spying and privacy work than the matter at hand itself.
There’s no doubt that TikTok doesn’t respect user privacy, and that it has people with very questionable morals and ethics behind it. This part isn’t debatable given what we know about them.