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This Look At Why Experts Worry About TikTok’s Privacy Settings Is Eye-Opening

#TikTok
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TikTok and the other ByteDance app icons on an iPhone

iStockphoto / Robert Way


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Privacy concerns surrounding TikTok, the Chinese-owned social network overseen by ByteDance, have abounded for years. Anytime someone musters up the strength to read TikTok’s Terms-of-Service they are stunned by how far TikTok overreaches when it comes to privacy.

Due to the dangers posed, the effort by U.S. politicians to ban TikTok has been ongoing since President Trump first tried to ban it during his first time back in 2020 until that effort was overturned by a federal judge. President Biden then punted the ban down the line until Trump was reelected and has since continued to sign executive orders delaying the ban. Currently, TikTok is set to banned in the United States on June 19th.

Examining The Threat TikTok Poses To Privacy And Americans

For now though, it is worth looking at just how TikTok’s privacy overreaching compares to other social networks. Brett Trembly, a Miami-based lawyer and founder of the Trembly Law Firm, posted a thread on X diving into the ways TikTok’s privacy overreaching is concerning and borderline dangerous. The first point he makes isn’t even related to privacy, it simply shows (via CBS) how in China kids on TikTok are shown educational content for the betterment of society and how in the United States they are fed… the exact opposite.

Everyone on social media has felt like they were the victim of a ‘lo-jacked microphone’ at some point. Where they’d be talking about something and minutes later be served ads for that on a social network because that network was listening through the microphone even though they claim they don’t. Well, TikTok’s default is access to your microphone, camera, all of your contacts, and photos:

While the above is concerning, this is a lot worse. TikTok can access details about your home Wi-Fi connection. It can manipulate the storage on your iPhone. The app will start itself when you boot your phone… Not good.

What Is TikTok Sending To ByteDance?

Once the app is open and you’re scrolling, and let’s be honest, we all scroll TikTok… There is a lot of information that routinely gets shared with parent company ByteDance. They are a Chinese-owned company and by law are required to share information with the Chinese government… So all of this information is being delivered straight to the Chinese:

I, for one, don’t love the idea of the Chinese government having access to literally everything in my phone’s address book…But all of the social networks do it, right?! Not so much.

Brett Trembly posted a breakdown of how Tiktok’s privacy overreaching compares to Meta’s Facebook and Instagram, the other two most popular video networks outside of YouTube:

‘Keystroke Patterns’ is as potentially dangerous as it sounds. That refers to the buttons you are clicking on your phone, like sensitive passwords. So if you have TikTok on your phone and have manually typed on passwords or credit card information at any point at all, there is major cause for concern.

That’s just one more reason that using fingerprint/facial identification and passkeys are crucial, whenever possible, on all of your devices. As well as turning on 2FA to all of your sensitive logins. Here are some ways that Trembly recommends protecting yourself against TikTok’s privacy intrusions:

While TikTok and ByteDance publicly claim that all of the U.S. data stays in Singapore investigations into those claims say otherwise and show that sensitive data from U.S. users is regularly transmitted back to mainland China:

Banning TikTok in the answer is not the right solution for countless reasons. But beyond that, it is hard to tell what the proper solution should be.

As a result of Trump’s tariffs war, it is believed the Chinese government no longer has any interest in divesting ByteDance’s U.S. operations through a sale of TikTok. It seems as if China would rather let TikTok in the U.S. die at this point than force a sale…

So, what should the solution be? And should the onus of privacy fall on the cellphone manufacturers and data carriers? That seems like the next logical path to sort all of this out.

Cass Anderson BroBible headshot and avatar
Cass Anderson is the Editor-in-Chief of BroBible and a graduate from Florida State University with nearly two decades of expertise in writing about Professional Sports, Fishing, Outdoors, Memes, Bourbon, Offbeat and Weird News, and as a native Floridian he shares his unique perspective on Florida News. You can reach Cass at cass@brobible.com
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