I have not had time to cool down yet information about the fact that on the devices running iOS the popular TikTok application behaves doubtfully, as it turned out new details of the behind-the-scenes life of this service. The enthusiasts who reverse engineered this entertainment application did outputthat it is more like a “personal data collection service disguised as a social network.”
As a result of the study, it turned out that the TikTok application collects, stores and processes information about:
- smartphone hardware (processor type, hardware identifiers, screen size and resolution, memory usage, disk space, etc.);
- other applications that the user installed (even those that have been removed);
- everything connected with the network (ip, local ip, mac addresses of the router and smartphone, name of the Wi-Fi access point);
- root / jailbreak;
- GPS data (approximately once every 30 seconds).
The application also configures the local proxy server on the mobile device to “transcode media”, which can be very easily abused, since it essentially has no authentication. Even more disturbing, according to the analysis, was that the collection of information on the device is controlled remotely, which makes reverse engineering more difficult.
By the way, a similar analysis of other popular mobile applications like Facebook, Instagram and Twitter showed that they collect incomparably less user data. So maybe the rumors that TikTok is a potential spy platform for the Chinese government are not rumors at all?
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