A Reddit user went under the hood of the increasingly controversial video sharing app TikTok, and what he found makes for a sobering and disturbing read.
A software engineer who is active on Reddit forums is said to have reverse-engineered the popular video sharing Chinese app, TikTok, and if the claims made by him are indeed true then most of you who have it on your phone would delete it forthwith.
The Reddit user Bangorlol went and reverse-engineered TikTok to see what makes it tick among the users — TikTok, for the record, has seen over 2 billion downloads.
And he said „…(F)eel confident in stating that I have a very strong understanding for how the app operates (or at least operated as of a few months ago).“
“TikTok is a data collection service that is thinly-veiled as a social network. If there is an API to get information on you, your contacts, or your device… well, they’re using it,“ Bangorlol said direly.
As per his research, TikTok collects more data than he has ever seen an app collect on its users, including CPU type, your phone number, hardware IDS, screen dimensions, DPI, memory usage and disk space. „And we haven’t even gotten to personal information and location tracking yet.“
It may even track “(o)ther apps you have installed (I’ve even seen some I’ve deleted show up in their analytics payload – maybe using as cached value?).
