How TIkTok enters in your privacy thanks to your cat
A few days ago the BBC said that an English journalist found herself unbeknownst to being monitored by TIkTok thanks to a series of data associated with her cat's account.
Let's start from the beginning. Cristina Criddle is a correspondent for the Financial Times and during the Christmas holidays TikTok contacts her to tell her that some of her employees have followed her movements from the app and that it was accidental.
The problem is that Cristina has an account on her phone in the name of her cat Buffy and there is nothing in the profile that mentions the occupation or location of the owner of the beautiful feline.
some data that was extrapolated from the account made it possible to locate Cristina to understand if she was meeting with other European colleagues. Not so “accidentally”, they think at BBC.
TikTOK has already fired the people responsible for the tracking for misconduct, but did not explain the specific extent and duration of the tracking over the months.
24/7 monitoring could have lasted more than a year.
Like most social-media networks, TikTok collects quite a lot of information about its account holders, including:
location data
"likes"
the device being used
online activity outside of the platform itself
TIKTOK has thus potentially violated the GDPR on multiple occasions and the recent positions taken by the European and American governments on limiting the use of the app in government offices (many countries and the European Union itself have banned direct employees from using the app) they are just an early warning that could turn into a much more serious problem for the platform, despite over 3.5 billion uploads around the world and offices also in Europe.
There is the real possibility that two distant and plausible scenarios will soon open up: a world without TikTok or a privacy regulation ready to deal with the protection of individuals' data to give access to platforms that are now integrated into daily life. The price? Pieces of existence and self-determination, drastically lowering the sense of confidentiality of each of us.