The Tiktok Privacy Concern You Don T Know About Data Mining

Why are we concerned about this issue? How does TikTok mine users’ data, and why?

What Is Data Mining?

Data mining means sorting information to gather facts about an entity or someone. Companies and individuals collect information on the internet for many reasons. One of them is to analyze customers’ behavioral patterns to tailor content and ads more accurately.

As the name implies, you can think of data mining as an excavation or gold exploration process that seeks to find fossil deposit patterns. Data miners can extract data points on a subject from right about anywhere.

For instance, an app developer might decide to gather more information about you from other services on your devices. Consequently, they might use this to analyze your content-consuming behavior.

Here’s the concept: data mining allows someone or an organization to place data points on you. Invariably, they know more about you and your pattern of living than you think in the long run. They can even predict how you might behave in the future.

TikTok’s Data Mining: Why You Should Be Concerned

Of course, it’s no crime to gather facts about publicly available data. But when data mining occurs on deeper webs like TikTok, it might raise privacy concerns since users’ details are typically exposed and monitored. And no one is sure how they use such information.

TikTok isn’t the only privacy intruder. For instance, Facebook also has several privacy issues that you can avoid. And its activity has leaked users’ data in many ways.

But TikTok’s data mining saga isn’t all about users’ privacy leaks; it appears more twisted than that. Reports have flown around in the past about how the app’s algorithm efficiently suppresses visibility for content containing specific keywords. Part of this is a fact contained in a 2019 report by The Washington Post detailing how TikTok’s algorithm repressed keywords featuring the unrest in Hong Kong at the time.

Many users also complain about how TikTok prevents their content from reaching a larger audience despite having many followers. All these make it look like TikTok uses the mined data to somewhat recognize and distinguish between users based on their races, colors, disparities, and abilities to determine what they can post. The company seems desperate about how it collects and uses information.

And what’s more outrageous? A part of TikTok’s privacy policy points out that although users can choose to share specific third-party data with them, they might collect this from those third-party apps automatically. Unfortunately, every user has to agree to this policy while registering on the app. Besides, how often do people take the time to read policies? Not too often, of course.

How and Why Does TikTok Mine Users’ Data?

So why does TikTok tap this many data points from its users? Besides, it’s not like it’s a loan or budget app that needs to monitor how users live or spend their time. It’s only a social app. Could it be spying on users for some reasons best known to its owners?

There are two categories of users on TikTok; unregistered content consumers and registered content creators or watchers. TikTok mines data from you if you fall in the latter category. These include information from your TikTok profile and the content you post on the app. But as mentioned, it digs further into third-party apps on your device to grab further information. This is even imminent if you register your TikTok account via third-party apps.

Companies that mine data might sell them, and this isn’t anything beyond what TikTok can do. Worse, it’s even without users’ consent. Experts also believe that TikTok might be spying on its teeming users across the globe. There’s still no evidence to back this claim, though.

Is TikTok Secure After All?

Whether or not TikTok is safe depends on how you view its data mining processes. While data mining isn’t a security issue itself, it can lead to data misuse. As you’ve seen, TikTok primarily uses the mined data to censor content and probably pick trails on its users.

Nonetheless, many third-party TikTok data harvesters take advantage of this intruding attribute of TikTok. It’s unclear whether it partners with these third-party scrapers to sell users’ data. But we’ve seen web apps like Apify, 4K Tokkit, Bright Data, and more offer automated TikTok scraping services, including profile data collection. And to say this is disturbing isn’t an overstatement.

Moreover, you can’t say for sure what people might do with your data once they collect it from these scraping services. However, we can predict this might provide hints about you to threat actors.

And while TikTok mines the data to analyze patterns about you, there have been concerns that it sells the output information to the government so they can spy heavily on users. Pertinent to this is a 2019 lawsuit reported on BBC News which claims that TikTok sends US users’ data to the Chinese government.

Can You Prevent TikTok From Mining Your Data From Third-Party Apps?

Preventing TikTok from tracking your details on third-party apps can be difficult since the app sometimes collects users’ data without their consent. It means even if you set your device to prevent app tracking, TikTok might not respect your choice.

But there are a couple of ways to limit the data TikTok collects and shares about you. One way is to avoid registering or logging into your TikTok account with third-party social authentications like Facebook, Google, or Twitter login. However, if you’re an iPhone user, you can use your Apple ID to register on the app. But you might want to use Apple’s Hide My Email feature while doing so.

While Android might not provide Apple’s type of anonymity, you can use third-party blockers if you’re an Android user. Specifically, you might want to try DuckDuckGo’s new privacy feature to block TikTok’s app tracking. And if you’re accessing TikTok via the browser, you might want to use privacy plugins.

Is It Time to Ditch TikTok?

Although TikTok’s data mining is shady, some people are indifferent. Now that you have more exposure to how TikTok might be using your data, dumping the app is still a personal preferential decision.

So it depends on your conviction. Nonetheless, it’s needful to say you can delete your account from TikTok and dump it for other alternatives if you feel threatened or unsafe.