TikTok is once again controversial, and in this case it has cost it a market of more than 1,000 million possible users: India, where it already accumulated more than 100 million (its largest market, followed by the United States, where it has just over 40 million ).
The blocking of the application, along with others of Chinese origin, is mainly due to hate speech and political issues, but after using the platform for several weeks, we can understand that there are certain concerns regarding the content of the platform and how This can affect minors and certain social groups that have suffered harassment and discrimination within the social network.
If you are thinking of deleting the app, or not allowing minors to access it, here are two good reasons to do so:
– Permissions: It is true that TikTok requests many permissions from the mobile, but they are not more permissions than other equally famous apps request (we already talked about this in our IGTV). The problem is not in the permissions it requests and yes in what you do with permission that we have granted. One thing, for example, is to give you access to our photo reel to get the material you are going to publish and another is to take the material and send it to your servers without permission (it is an example, it does not mean that you do it).
The fact is that recently an analysis of part of the code of the application was made, and the result went viral on reddit. The user ToBrown05 did reverse engineering, and part of the result was disclosed on Twitter:
A guy on reddit reversed engineered #TikTok
Heres what he found on the data it collects on you
Its far worse than just stealing whats on your clipboard: pic.twitter.com/oqaQyYDXT2
– Dan Okopnyi (@ d1rtydan) June 28, 2020
With the permissions it has and the information it collects, it could range from knowing our name, surname, bank and the amount of money we have, to monitoring what we write to capture passwords. I highly doubt they will, but he has the technical ability to do it.
– Content policy: It does not take a lot of time to end up discovering teen content with a clear sexual content. From positions of all kinds to reaction when I do this to my boyfriend or if you are a boy you sure understand, there is everything on TikTok. In some cases it borders on bad taste, and although there are no explicit images, because they will end up being eliminated, in many cases they are not necessary to know what is being talked about. The fact is that if some content that borders on pornography is reported (and on many occasions we talk about minors), TikTok’s response is that we have not found anything that violates our conditions of use.
It is difficult to know where the line is between what is allowed and what is not allowed, but it is clear that if a social network is created mainly for minors, it is important to be careful with certain things.
Tik Tok is not going through good times, and it seems that it will have to change a lot to change its image before millions of users around the world.
