A few days ago, the self-proclaimed Twitter account of the notorious hacker group Anonymous posted the message: `Delete TikTok now.`
The source for this call came from a post by a Reddit user named Bangorlol, a software engineer with many years of experience, who reverse-engineered TikTok and was amazed at what the app was doing.
If social networks like Facebook and Twitter only collect certain information about users, TikTok will use every possible API to collect as much information about users as possible.
`- Phone hardware (CPU type, number of processes, hardware identifier, screen resolution, pixel density, memory usage, storage.)…
– Apps you install on your phone – even apps you delete are included in TikTok’s analytics.
– All information related to the network data you use (IP address, local IP address, router’s MAC address, MAC address on your computer, wifi access name).
– The collection of this information takes place whether or not your device is rooted or jailbroken.
– Some versions of this application also ping GPS after a certain period of time, each time about 30 seconds apart.
– It also sets up a proxy server right on your device to `transcode media files` but it can be easily compromised without any authentication measures.`
It seems that this application is also afraid that someone will reverse its technology, like Bangorlol did, and discover how much information they are collecting, so TikTok is equipped with many other layers of protection.
The suspicious behavior of this application does not stop here.
`- There are also a few small lines of code on the Android version of the app that allow downloading a remote archive, decompressing it, and executing the binary code within it. There is no reason an app
– The effort to prevent users from knowing how much information they collect about you is so great that TikTok encrypts all analytics requests with an algorithm that changes with each update (at least
– While trying to prevent users from knowing their secret behaviors, TikTok neglects user data security.
The above issues are the reason why Anonymous calls on users to delete TikTok immediately.
In addition to bangorlol’s reverse engineering analysis, Apple’s recent iOS 14 version also caught TikTok accessing the user’s iPhone cache, so it is possible to track every user’s actions.
Refer to Forbes
