Reportedly, TikTok sent the data to Byte Dance, its parent company.
TikTok lands in hot waters yet again. A report from the Wall Street Journal reveals that until last November, the short video platform was tracking MAC addresses on Android phones violating Google’s terms of services (ToS).
Reportedly the app antithetically skirted the privacy loophole to get the data and also bypassed an unusual extra layer of encryption that obliterated the approach. Google in 2015 followed Apple’s suit and prevented third party applications from collecting MAC addresses to prevent companies from building consumer behavior profiles.
MAC addresses are hardware identifiers for internet-connected devices that are most commonly used for advertising purposes. TikTok collected these unique identifiers and sent them to ByteDance (parent company) when a user first installed and opened the application on their devices.
See: TikTok vulnerability allowed hackers to send SMS with malware
Besides this, the app also collected a 32 digit advertising ID that basically allows marketers to track user behavior for ad profiling purposes. Even if privacy-conscious users reset their advertising ID, the MAC addresses won’t change, thus, the app can relink prior data.
Regarding the accusation, as reported by the WSJ, TikTok c ..
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