News hardware Don’t have TikTok? The app still tracks you
Data is the sinews of war for many companies in the tech world, and TikTok is the new champion in this field. So much so that you don’t need to have the app to get your data siphoned off.
TikTok, more than just an app
You have fallen into the trap of TikTok and you can’t get out of it. Every day you spend at least an hour swiping up to skip to the next video. They are interspersed with advertisements, which are skillfully targeted depending on what you are watching on the app.
All of this is nothing new. Facebook has been doing this for years, and is far from alone. On the other hand, TikTok does not only track its own users. Your friend who still and always resists the Chinese social network is probably also taken from his data by the application.
But how do they do it? Nothing illegal don’t worry, it’s just another business of the Chinese firm, which is also used to improve advertisements on its own platform.
TikTok stalks you on a whole bunch of websites
It was Consumer Reports who, following a little investigation, that TikTok “is in partnership with a growing number of companies to suck up data from people browsing the internet. This includes those without a TikTok account”. In the same way as Facebook.
“Pixels”. It’s the name mini-trackers that TikTok implements on its customers’ websites to help them target advertisements to potential customers. These trackers also make it possible to measure the effectiveness of said advertisements.
Consumer Reports scoured around 20,000 websites looking for those infamous pixels. Among these sites, several hundred of them are equipped with it. The general public does not yet have this kind of view of TikTok, while the company behaves similarly to Meta (Facebook). A real data business on a very large scale.
Of course, all this does not yet await the spheres of Google or Metabut TikTok’s advertising business is booming, and should quickly gain an important place.
What data is taken and where does it go?
Also via Consumer Reports research, a sample of 15 sites was selected for further analysis. These are sites where people expect a minimum of privacy, such as lawyer platforms, hospitals or resale sites.
The data is the IP address, the unique identification number, what page you are on, what you click on, what you type…
No surprise, TikTok uses this data to improve the efficiency of its own advertising services. Information obtained from people without an account on the app is simply forwarded to TikTok’s client sites, not to other internet advertising companies, according to TikTok.
There’s no real way to be certain of these advances made by the firm, and given all the scandals caused by Facebook during their Roaring Twenties, one can only doubt the claims of the next personal data guru.
