A software researcher put TikTok under scrutiny after publishing an investigation that shows that the Chinese application does indeed spy on its users. Apparently, when a person accesses a link through the app, it tracks all their activity, including keystrokes, making it a threat to privacy in general.
The study was conducted by Felix Krause, a Vienna-based software researcher, who published his findings last Thursday. According to them, TikTok is able to monitor this activity through a browser integrated into the company’s app, which happens to be part of the app itself.
In other words, when users tap ads in the app or visit links in content creators’ profiles, TikTok does not open the page with conventional browsers, but defaults to an in-app browser made by them that is capable of rewriting parts of web pages.
According to the research, from this point on, the platform tracks the user’s activity by injecting lines of the JavaScript programming language into the websites visited within the application.
“When opening a website from within the TikTok iOS app, they inject code that can observe every keyboard input (which may include credit card details, passwords, or other sensitive information). “This was an active choice the company made. This is a non-trivial engineering task. This does not happen by mistake or randomly,” Krause said of his findings.
“Besides injecting pcm.js (as covered last week), Instagram also injects JavaScript code to observe all taps happening inside their in-app browser, like clicking on buttons, links, or images. Hence, it becomes more important than ever to find a solution to end using custom in-app browsers for showing third-party content”,” the researcher added.
The Trump administration and its warning about TikTok
At the time, Donald Trump’s administration noted the potential danger TikTok could pose to the United States.
“It is an active participant in China’s civil-military fusion and is subject to mandatory cooperation with the intelligence services,” the Commerce Department, then commanded by Wilbur Ross, said at the time.
Krause’s recent discovery caught the attention of millions of people worldwide, one of them being Senator Ted Cruz. “Every time TikTok gets asked questions about their ties to the CCP, they desperately dodge. Now it’s clear they’re spying on users. This is staggeringly concerning,” the Republican wrote on his Twitter account.
Joaquín Núñez es licenciado en comunicación periodística por la Universidad Católica Argentina. Se especializa en el escenario internacional y en la política nacional norteamericana. Confeso hincha de Racing Club de Avellaneda. Contacto: [email protected] // Joaquín Núñez has a degree in journalistic communication from the Universidad Católica Argentina. He specializes in the international scene and national American politics. Confessed fan of Racing Club of Avellaneda. Contact: [email protected]