2024-03-07 11:39:22
The controversial app TikTok is one of the most popular services in recent years – politicians are also increasingly drawn to the platform. This is what you should know.
The most important things at a glance
The popularity of the Chinese app TikTok remains unbroken, especially among young people. With the application, users can add music to cell phone videos and share them with a large fan base. TikTok promises quick entertainment, but also quick fame – and all for free.
That’s not trivial. The online video platform of the Chinese company ByteDance is repeatedly targeted by authorities because of possible threats to its mostly young users. Non-governmental organizations such as AlgorithmWatch are also critical of the service and are investigating how the platform evaluates its users’ data.
App ban on work cell phones
Numerous countries are now also critical of TikTok. They doubt that the fun app from China is safe. Because they assume that TikTok collects its users’ data and sends it to the parent company ByteDance. Security experts are concerned that this could then be forwarded, sold or otherwise exploited.
Politicians in the EU Commission are therefore not allowed to install the social media app on their work devices. Austria has also banned its civil servants from using the app. There is no official order for German politicians. However, use was blocked even without a direct ban, the “Tagesspiegel” reported last year. The app cannot be installed on the devices.
Germany sees TikTok users themselves as primarily responsible, said Federal Interior Minister Nancy Fiber. Everyone should be careful about what information they share. After all, there is a Chinese company behind the social media app, “which is state-owned and where the data can of course flow out.”
TikTok creates user profiles
Like other social media apps, TikTok measures the behavior of its users. Mainly, it is said, to display the content that the user wants. This means that the app evaluates, for example, which videos were viewed for how long and how often, which clips the user ignored or which content they reacted to.
This allows the ByteDance company to create an accurate user profile and collect information about the user – likes, dislikes, interests, wishes – that hardly anyone else knows.
Targeted manipulation
This can be dangerous if platforms use this knowledge to manipulate their users. This is what happened during the 2020 US election campaign – but on Facebook at the time. More on this in this article.
The danger also exists with TikTok, in that the company theoretically plays out the content in such a way that it changes the political attitude of a user and, for example, only displays pro-Chinese content.
Further risks from TikTok
But targeted manipulation is not the only problem that security experts have with the app. This is shown by the data scandal that affected several US journalists who had reported critically on the parent company ByteDance. Accordingly, the giant company used the data from the TikTok app to find out the whereabouts of journalists and whether they were meeting with TikTok employees.
What else TikTok knows about its users
In addition to user behavior and locations, the video app also accesses other data from the user’s smartphone or actively and continuously requests access if the user does not consent. This includes, among other things, access to all contacts from the phone book, to the location service, the calendar, the data from the clipboard, information about the current and previous WLAN connections as well as the telephone and voicemail number of the smartphone.
TikTok collects this data
- Profile information such as mobile number and/or email address
- Contact information of people in the address book
- typed comments and reactions (likes)
- own uploaded videos and texts
- Location information
- Advertising ID (Each TikTok user receives their own identification number. This allows advertisers who have placed content on TikTok to accurately identify the user)
This is what security experts recommend
Users who use TikTok should definitely check the security settings of their cell phones to see which rights they have given the video app and question whether the app really needs all of them or whether they should rather deny certain access rights.