Companies always track data and major social media companies and online search engines ALWAYS keep track of user search history. That data is often sold or used to find out what you are searching about and what brands you like. I guess it IS impossible to stop these big brands :-)
TikTok unlawfully tracks shopping habits and use of dating apps?
21–30 of 142 posts
Re: TikTok unlawfully tracks shopping habits and use of dating apps?
#22Pretty sure TikTok and Instagram are sharing data somehow as well. My feeds are near identical.
I don't know, maybe they are colluding, but it is funny to default to that assumption over both platforms just delivering you the same content because you have the same behavior across both apps.
Not so laughable after working in big tech
Re: TikTok unlawfully tracks shopping habits and use of dating apps?
#23I'll post some inside baseball: Almost everyone in ecom is running every ad network integration they can, no matter the source of traffic. So if you click a Facebook ad, load a website, enter your information/checkout ALL of your information goes to every other network they integrate with. You might never use TikTok, you might have every Facebook domain blacklisted, but when you clicked on a Google search "result" (a…
I'm already low-consumption, but my personal boycott of any site using shopify, which straight up has all integrations in their js you can inspect, has lowered my consumption even further. I've been emailing stores asking them to switch to bigcommerce, or whatever, and stop sharing their customers' data. Never get answers, though I never expect any.
Re: TikTok unlawfully tracks shopping habits and use of dating apps?
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
Don't worry, when you blackhole the entire tiktok domain, you'll still be able to use grindr. Or did you still want to be able to view tiktok? Sorry. Can't help you there. Or can I? https://www.torproject.org/download/ or https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/proton-vpn-fast-sec...
TikTok will de-anonymize you and connect you back to the ad networks in days, speaking as someone who tried really, really hard to not get it to do that. They probably have the most sophisticated fingerprinting ever created.
Yep! And luckily Tor Browser works pretty hard at defending against that. It even goes so far as to box the rendered page resolution so it cannot be connected to the same resolution as your main browser.
But you can take first steps by using a simple dns proxy to make things more difficult.
Re: TikTok unlawfully tracks shopping habits and use of dating apps?
#25Pretty sure TikTok and Instagram are sharing data somehow as well. My feeds are near identical.
I don't know, maybe they are colluding, but it is funny to default to that assumption over both platforms just delivering you the same content because you have the same behavior across both apps.
Notably, this started happening the day that I made my TikTok account public. My Instagram feed began to be a copy of my TikTok feed. The exact same videos. Even after changing my Tiktok back to private and deleting all of my followers, the feeds are still identical, every single day. My behavior is not. On Instagram, I follow and interact with very different accounts than on TikTok. It seems to me that Instagram is buying or accessing TikTok's data, and it is not through advertising providers, because the identical content is coming directly from Instagram/TikTok and not promoted ads.
Re: TikTok unlawfully tracks shopping habits and use of dating apps?
#26I guess it's pretty much impossible to stop these companies from gathering data, there's too much money in it, it's too easy to implement, and there's no cohesive force to stop them. I'm wondering whether a crowdfunded effort to feed fake data into these systems would work so we overwhelm them and make their plans a bit more difficult.
"The only winning move is not to play." If you look at these systems that same way some people look at casinos - places specifically designed to take your money - you realize there isn't a way to change them nor improve your overall experience with them. You just don't go inside. I'm kinda hoping that it becomes the trend in the next few decades to completely abandon these algorithm-driven data-hoarding attention-ste…
I used to be highly addicted to scrolling. Tiktok, reddit, instagram, everything. It nearly cost me my relationship and I swore it off ever since. I’ve been offline those apps for a few months now, and have never felt better. Cant believe what i was allowing to happen to my attention!
Re: TikTok unlawfully tracks shopping habits and use of dating apps?
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
Highly recommend people check out this simple alternative. It's like a better, modern dnsmasq. https://github.com/AdguardTeam/dnsproxy
Setting up a whole-home adblocking solution takes a few minutes with pi hole, and it's got a very functional web interface for actions such as unblocking specific sites for specific systems on your network. That dns proxy looks intriguing but looks like quite a bit different from the simplicity of pi hole.
dnsproxy is a single binary that does everything, very simple.
Re: TikTok unlawfully tracks shopping habits and use of dating apps?
#28I guess it's pretty much impossible to stop these companies from gathering data, there's too much money in it, it's too easy to implement, and there's no cohesive force to stop them. I'm wondering whether a crowdfunded effort to feed fake data into these systems would work so we overwhelm them and make their plans a bit more difficult.
"The only winning move is not to play." If you look at these systems that same way some people look at casinos - places specifically designed to take your money - you realize there isn't a way to change them nor improve your overall experience with them. You just don't go inside. I'm kinda hoping that it becomes the trend in the next few decades to completely abandon these algorithm-driven data-hoarding attention-ste…
> I've been calling it "digital hygiene", personally.
Don't forget mental hygiene. Letting these apps have access to your brain causes legitimate brain damage in the same way smoking causes lung damage.
Re: TikTok unlawfully tracks shopping habits and use of dating apps?
#29> TikTok was only able to receive this information with the help of the Israeli data company AppsFlyer and Grindr itself.
So basically, the TikTok app is not spying on your dating apps - your dating apps are willingly selling your information to them, through intermediaries.
This means uninstalling tiktok won’t help. And worse, many other companies are getting your dating info too.
Re: TikTok unlawfully tracks shopping habits and use of dating apps?
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
"The only winning move is not to play." If you look at these systems that same way some people look at casinos - places specifically designed to take your money - you realize there isn't a way to change them nor improve your overall experience with them. You just don't go inside. I'm kinda hoping that it becomes the trend in the next few decades to completely abandon these algorithm-driven data-hoarding attention-ste…
I used to be highly addicted to scrolling. Tiktok, reddit, instagram, everything. It nearly cost me my relationship and I swore it off ever since. I’ve been offline those apps for a few months now, and have never felt better. Cant believe what i was allowing to happen to my attention!
How'd you do it?