The possibility of TikTok being a company in the US instill on a scale as it’s treated as an acquisition target and security risk at once, and now we are given to you detail on the kind of information it had been tracking about users. Their analysis of its Andriod app dug into various versions from 2018 through 2020, and said it “wasn’t collecting an unusual amount of information for a mobile app.”
However, the outlier is that until late last year, TikTok used a common security flaw to get around Android protections that stop apps from tailing users through the MAC address of their device. That code identifies a device on a network and is usually not converted, so someone could track installations across different accounts that occur on the same device to link a person’s ID to a specific piece of hardware.
As the WSJ explains, Google presents an anonymized advertising ID that users can easily reset, as opposed to the MAC address that doesn’t have the same opt-out capabilities. There are other ways used for this ‘ID bridging’ that don’t involve the MAC address, and according to their investigation, TikTok removed its tracking with an update on November 18th of last year.
Trying users ID to hardware in a way that’s hard to change particularly without notifying them of it, is big trouble, and mobile platforms aren’t the only place where it’s shown up. In 2019, researchers detailed how makers of TV apps on Fire TV and Roku were bypassing advertising IDs to collect the MAC addresses on devices, and Roku updated its software shortly after to take away that capability.
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