Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Social Media
  3. News

TikTok secretly collected unique device IDs for over a year on Android

By

TikTok unlawfully collected unique device identifiers on Android for at least 15 months, according to a new investigation by The Wall Street Journal. The app is said to have been secretly scooping up a piece of data called the MAC address, which is unique for every phone and enables advertisers to identify and track you across the internet.

Recommended Videos

Since 2015, both Apple and Google have prohibited apps to read devices’ MAC addresses on iOS and Android. TikTok, however, reportedly circumvented these restrictions by engineering a workaround that a study cited by the Journal found inside nearly 350 other Android apps.

Related

MAC addresses can’t be reset and always remain the same for a given device. This practically takes away your ability to start with a clean slate and evade advertising companies. Advertisers can take advantage of this to ID you even when you’re not necessarily logged in.

Therefore, say for any reason, you decide to refresh your advertising profile — an action you can take by heading into a particular app’s preferences or your phone’s settings. Because TikTok has your MAC address too, this move will be rendered ineffective since the app can misuse the personally identifiable data to link your previous advertising profile to the new one.

In its developer guidelines, Google explicitly warns that “a new advertising identifier must not be connected to a previous advertising identifier or data derived from a previous advertising identifier without the explicit consent of the user.”

The Journal also found an extra layer of encryption inside the TikTok app which it said could be potentially engineered to camouflage these fraudulent data practices. However, a TikTok spokesperson, in a statement sent to Digital Trends, said that the “assertions made in the article misrepresent [their] intentions for using encryption.” “Encryption is a common way to prevent malicious behavior linked to fraudulent activity,” they added.

A Google spokesperson told Digital Trends that the company is investigating the Journal’s findings and has no further comment at the moment.

TikTok abandoned the practice last year in November — a timing many will consider especially suspicious. Around this time, the Chinese short-video video app was under increased scrutiny for its ties to China in the United States as well as several more countries. The White House has accused TikTok of working with the Chinese government to snoop on Americans — claims TikTok has repeatedly denied.

Last week, President Donald Trump signed an executive order that will ban TikTok if it fails to hand over its United States operations to a U.S.-based company.

“Like our peers, we constantly update our app to keep up with evolving security challenges. We encourage our users to download the most current version of TikTok,” commented the TikTok spokesperson further.

Editors' Recommendations

Topics
Shubham Agarwal
Shubham Agarwal
Journalist
Shubham Agarwal is a freelance technology journalist from Ahmedabad, India. His work has previously appeared in Firstpost…
Is TikTok leaking drafts? Let’s take a closer look at this rumor
The TikTok app on a smartphone's screen. The smartphone is sitting on a white table.

Not every social media post is ready for prime time. Sometimes you write a post or film a video and decide that it's better to not publish it. That's fine. That's what the Drafts folder is for. That folder is built to hold your works-in-progress, mistakes, and other too-goofy-for-public-consumption posts and videos. The Drafts folder is probably one that you take for granted, but what if that folder (via a particularly viral-prone social media platform) were to have its content leaked and published for the world to see? Scary, isn't it?

That's the fear that's behind a certain, now years-long TikTok rumor going around. But is it true? Is TikTok leaking its users' drafts? In this guide, we're taking a closer look at this rumor and fact-checking it.
The rumor
As far as we can tell, the whole "TikTok leaks drafts" rumor dates back to at least the summer of 2020. It's not a rumor that really made mainstream news headlines, but it did get some coverage with lesser-known websites, and it does have a tendency to resurface repeatedly. The last time it resurfaced was in August 2022. Here's what we know about it:

Read more
TikTok pivots to photos while its competitors are still chasing its viral videos
Smartphone with TikTok's Photo Mode all on a white background.

TikTok's competitors have been all over the news recently for essentially copying the short-form video sharing app's  most successful moves. But while everyone else is pivoting to video, TikTok is now taking swings in the other direction: photos.

On Thursday, TikTok announced a slew of new editing and creation features, but the one tool that caught our eye was Photo Mode. Because the image that TikTok shared in its official announcement depicted a photo carousel-style image post that looks a lot like Instagram.

Read more
New feature shows that even Twitter wants to be like TikTok now
Twitter's new full screen feature for videos on the mobile app.

Is TikTok the new queen bee of social media? It appears so as even Twitter couldn't resist copying TikTok. Twitter's latest feature announcement seems to be yet another indication that the viral video app sensation is clearly the new leader among its peers. After all, TikTok is setting trends and its competitors are all following them.

On Thursday, Twitter announced two new video-focused features for its app and one of those features bears a strong resemblance to TikTok. That feature (known as the "immersive media viewer") allows users to open videos in a vertical "full-screen mode" -- just like TikTok -- and continue to view more videos by swiping up (also just like TikTok).

Read more