The Chinese TikTok is under attack. Several countries forbid or consider doing so. The app still seems to be connected to Chinese servers, whose addresses are still in the app’s code.
TikTok is the western variant of a Chinese social media app, which is mainly aimed at young users (and therefore also attracts older men). But the app does request a lot of data from the users. “More than Instagram” is always the comparison in the article.
Not that Instagram is less harmful, because in the article it is acknowledged that Facebook, together with Whatsapp (which is also theirs), can probably draw up the same profile, because it gets practically the same data. And there is the hypocrisy: The Chinese do exactly the same, but because Facebook cuts it into pieces, it is suddenly less of a problem.
Research therefore shows that TikTok still has the addresses of Chinese data servers in the algorithm. The suggestion is made that this is a remnant of a series of updates, but ‘I didn’t know it was still there’ is a very weak excuse, especially for a software company.
China is simply unmasked here, but Western social media and tech companies just remain out of reach. And that while both will prove to be very dangerous in the long run …
