Privacy analysis of Tiktok’s app and website

Post by yorwba » Sat, Dec 07, 2019, 11:10 AM UTC

HunOL wrote: post #154

SeriousM wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even though these practices may be legal you'll agree that 99% of the people here are not ok with them. It's not needed to send personal data around the world for tracking. The core functionality of tiktok doesn't need that at all.

> Even though these practices may be legal you'll agree that 99% of the people here are not ok with them Sad truth is that they are not ok with it only because it's TikTok and it has Chinese origin.

Post by singularity2001 » Sat, Dec 07, 2019, 11:16 AM UTC

rufposten wrote: post #155

yding wrote: post #44

The GDPR law is complex, but I'm 99% sure that this guy is misinterpreting it here. Sending data to Google, FaceBook and AppsFlyer (and other American companies) is generally legal under GDPR. All three companies are covered under the US-EU Privacy Shield framework: https://www.privacyshield.gov/participant_search Furthermore, sending PII data to a non-EU country is also allowed under GDPR as long as the company in q…

I'm the author and even if I know GDPR quite well as professional journalist I know I can't interprete a law on my own, so I additionally asked an legal expert in this field. So this is what he explained: 1. Sending data to Appsflyer is OK in general, but you have to declare to which parties the data will be sent afterwards. As most of the partners will be joint controllers of the data you have to lay open the arrang…

Post by tempguy9999 » Sat, Dec 07, 2019, 11:21 AM UTC

kbenson wrote: post #95

dylz wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What's a charitable reason that stops even a supposedly privacy-concerned niche browser like Brave from implementing opt-ins for these things? In my experience, blocking these everywhere globally as a default will result in being banned from websites, trigger bullshit "fraud" invasive analytics, and all sorts of obnoxious fail-closed problems by invasive trackers. You will also be banned from most Distil-hosted sit…

If a large enough chunk of people do it, then it becomes unfeasible to block them all. If Safari, Firefox and Internet Explorer all implemented a block, it doesn't really matter that Chrome doesn't. That's ~30% of browsing traffic, and no sane company with a large web presence is going to throw away 30% of their traffic.

Post by yahnu » Sat, Dec 07, 2019, 11:50 AM UTC

chki wrote: post #160

Razengan wrote: post #158

I wonder if Facebook and Google are pushing all these articles about/against Tiktok because it’s a threat to them.

And I wonder whether comments like yours are spread by the Chinese Government to undermine trust in our media/democracy.

Post by gilfillan9 » Sat, Dec 07, 2019, 1:01 PM UTC

shakna wrote: post #142

iudqnolq wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exposing the window size is needed for many festures. CSS media queries change what's displayed based on the screen size, and pure css can cause effects that can be independently measured (set a css property and the read it with JS and log the result, or have the css load a background image with tracking data embedded in ths url). Webapps that manually position elements using JavaScript use the API as well. It's also…

CSS media queries don't get handled by anything that has the capability to send that information back, so window size reporting isn't needed for that. The only place that needs it, are those JS apps that manually position items. Measuring text overflow is only possible by the APIs exposed by the CSSOM set [0], which also happens to include the window sizing elements. If we only allowed a subset of that group, all tho…

  @media (min-width: 600px) { .pixel { background-image: url("/pixel?width=600"); } }
  @media (min-width: 700px) { .pixel { background-image: url("/pixel?width=700"); } }