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The risks of TikTok: what data the app collects and how to configure it safely for children

2023-04-24T10:12:02.912Z


The Chinese platform does not differ too much from Instagram, Facebook and the most used, although it requires some care.


TikTok is one of the most popular apps in the world.

With close to one billion

active

users

, the short video platform managed to establish itself among the most used, especially by young people.

However, it faces censorship problems around the world, led by the United States and several projects to ban it.

Now, what kind of

user information does

the app collect and why do they accuse it of being

dangerous

?

These questions have been used as a banner to limit the use of the application in the West.

Canada, the United States or even the European Union have prohibited it in official government devices and among the reasons given for doing so are the laws that allow the Chinese government to secretly request data from Chinese companies and citizens for intelligence operations.

ByteDance

, the owner of TikTok, is a Chinese company.

As they argue, they are also concerned that the eastern country could use TikTok's content recommendations to misinform, something that the company's own CEO, Shou Zi Chew,

denied before the US Congress

.


And America is going for more: Earlier last month, the House Foreign Affairs Committee voted to pass a bill that could give a president the authority to ban the platform altogether.

For these reasons, the app has taken center stage and it is crucial to try to understand

which user data it collects first, and which it shares second.

It is probable, however, that the precautions that have to be taken with TikTok

are the same that have to be taken with any social network

, not only with the app owned by Byte Dance.

What TikTok says: the official word

Shou Zi Chew testified before the United States Congress.

Photo Reuters

Consulted by

Clarín

, the company, which does not yet have local representation -

it is opening offices in Argentina in these months

-, limited itself to sharing the company's privacy policy.

That is, they did not answer specific questions with a company spokesperson.

Words more, words less, the company ensures that

it can collect everything that the user accepted when registering the account

: profile information, the user, direct messages, information on purchases within the app, telephone contacts and of social networks and even proof of identity (if provided)

such as a personal document.

But in addition to this information that the user himself provides, TikTok also collects data automatically: the

location

of the mobile device,

cookies

, and images and audio produced by the user.

All this can be seen on the official page of their privacy policy.

“Let's take into account that these services request

access to the location

(some even trying to maintain this permission in the long term), to the

microphone

, the

camera

and even to our contacts (promoted many times in a friendlier way: 'Contact synchronization' or 'Find your acquaintances on this platform'), warns Emmanuel Di Battista, a security analyst at BCA LTD, a cybersecurity firm.

There is a fact that is not minor, the expert highlights:

the exposure of third parties

.

“In this last case we are not exposing 'our' contacts but

our contacts

: do we have permission to give this information?

Does our contact really want to be synchronized or 'invited' to another platform or social network?

Do you have the possibility of deleting this information irresponsibly shared by a third party (us) and without his consent? ”, he wonders.

"This is repeated in most social networking services, and even many of them do not allow "granularity" in the permissions (discriminate one by one), but either we accept all of them or we do not use the app," he says.


Of course, the telemetry of the use of the application is one of the most important points and which explains the

precision of the platform's recommendation algorithm

, one of the most powerful in the world, which is actively worked on by company employees.

TikTok: what the report warns and what care to be taken

The US-China War is in the background of the fight.

AFP photo

Internet 2.0 is the Australian cybersecurity firm that has warned that the situation is more dire than it seems.

"When the application is in use, it has many more permissions than it really needs," explained Robert Potter, co-executive director of the report, in an interview in the British outlet The Guardian.

Grant those permissions by default

.

When a user doesn't give permission, TikTok asks insistently.

If you tell Facebook that you don't want to share something, it doesn't ask you again.

TikTok is much more aggressive in this regard”, the expert had argued.

For this reason, they qualify it as "too intrusive".

"Perhaps talking about 'danger' when using an app like TikTok is a bit of an exaggerated expression, what is a problem is when we

expose too much our profiles

, our privacy, our data, the life of our family and others, because that is where the risk of losing the right to privacy comes into play, the risk of being monitored, the risk of being watched”, explained

Beatriz Busaniche, president of the Vía Libre Foundation and privacy specialist

, in dialogue with Clarín

.

and right to information.

This is a problem not only for TikTok, but for tech giants in general.

"Companies have the obligation to comply with the laws of each country in which they operate that have to do with the data protection of its citizens, who will be users of these services," explains Carolina Martínez Elebi, a graduate in Communication from the University from Buenos Aires and founder of DHyTecno.

“The protection of privacy also involves

the security of the information they handle

.

This, as has been seen in recent years, is being increasingly violated even in large companies that one would expect to have a more robust development of information security, ”she criticizes.

In fact, several tech giants suffered cybersecurity incidents that exposed users' personal data.

“Only in the last few years we have had different cybersecurity incidents that involved social networks.

In 2021, scrappers abused Facebook's 'Import Contacts' feature to extract private information from millions of accounts.

In 2022,

Twitter

suffered a similar data breach at the hands of scrappers, who abused its API to

collect information from millions of users

, ”recalls Di Battista.

For all these issues, it is always better

to think twice about what permissions are given to an application

, what it is going to be used for and what we are going to reveal with each personal post we make.

TikTok: advice for the use of the youngest

The child population is one of the most vulnerable to TikTok trends.

AP Photo

For the use of minors and, above all, infants, TikTok allows you to configure certain issues

for safe use

.

This is not a minor issue due to the dangerous viral challenges that, in many cases, have ended in tragedies.

The application allows you to configure accounts as

"private" by default for those under 15 years of age

, in contrast to users who are over that age, whose profiles are public by default.

In addition, it restricts the download of content created by people under 16 years of age, unless manually changed in the settings.

The problem is that while the official minimum age for TikTok users is 13,

there is no verification mechanism

for this restriction.

From the computer security company ESET they recommend using one of the features offered by TikTok called "

Family Synchronization".

"It allows the profile of the children to be linked with that of their tutors, that is, they can control direct messages, set screen time limits, as well as directly activate and deactivate restricted content," they say.

“It is a useful tool that the application offers so that parents can have some control over the content that their children consume, as well as over the people with whom they can interact online.

It is the TikTok version of parental control”, explains Sol Gonzalez from ESET Latin America.

Thus, the reach of TikTok is so great that the competition has copied the idea in all its forms, from Instagram reels to YouTube shorts.

So perhaps the biggest risk the company poses is to the app marketplace ruled by

giants like Google, Facebook, Amazon and Apple

.

Which does not mean that you do not have to take precautions, the same ones that you have to take with Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp.

SL

look too

US threatens to ban TikTok if Chinese company Bytedance doesn't sell shares

Another government joins the ban on TikTok on official devices: Belgium

Source: clarin

All tech articles on 2023-04-24

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