Surprise! TikTok takes and gives away more of your data than any social media app

The study, published by mobile marketing company URL Genius, found that YouTube and TikTok track the personal data of users more than other social media apps. YouTube uses that data for ads and to track your online search history. But TikTok allows third-party trackers to collect your data. Who those trackers are, what data they are collecting, and what they are using it for is entirely unknown to anyone but TikTok and those trackers.

Of course, we have a suspicion about the identity of at least one of those third parties. TikTok is a Chinese app owned by the Chinese company ByteDance, which has vowed to “deepen cooperation” with the Chinese Communist Party and cannot legally refuse to share data with the CCP under Chinese law. The site has been caught logging keystrokes of users and circumventing user protections put in place by the Apple and Google app stores.

We also know from leaked audio of internal meetings that U.S. users have had their data accessed from China repeatedly. According to one member of TikTok’s Trust and Safety department, “everything is seen in China.” Even while the Democratic National Committee uses TikTok to try and reach voters, it uses dedicated devices for the app that do not have important files on them. TikTok is Chinese spyware, and politicians, banks, and the Defense Department all know it.

Chinese tech companies like ByteDance are effectively organs of the Chinese Communist Party. TikTok has repeatedly shown that it is not independent of its parent company and that it has even less regard for user privacy than American tech companies. The app does not belong on American devices or American app stores.