TikTok: Tracking Humanoids? Nope, Never, Ever
October 21, 2022
I read “TikTok Denies It Could Be Used to Track US Citizens.” Allegedly linked to the cheerful nation state China, TikTok allegedly asserts that it cannot, does not, and never ever thought about analyzing log data. Nope, we promise.
The article asserts:
The social media giant said on Twitter that it has never been used to “target” the American government, activists, public figures or journalists. The firm also says it does not collect precise location data from US users.
Here’s a good question: Has notion of persistent cookies, geospatial data, content consumption analytics, psychological profiling based on thematics have never jived with TikTok data at the Surveillance Soirée?
The answer is, according to the Beeb:
The firm [TikTok] also says it does not collect precise location data from US users. It was responding to a report in Forbes that data would have been accessed without users’ knowledge or consent. The US business magazine, which cited documents it had seen, reported that ByteDance had started a monitoring project to investigate misconduct by current and former employees. It said the project, which was run by a Beijing-based team, had planned to collect location data from a US citizen on at least two occasions.
Saying is different from doing in my opinion.
Based on my limited experience with online, would it be possible for a smart system with access to log data to do some high-value data analysis? Would it be possible to link the analytics’ output with a cluster of users? Would be possible to cross correlate data so that individuals with a predicted propensity of a desired behavior to be identified?
Of course not. Never. Nation states and big companies are fountains of truth.
TikTok. Why worry?
Stephen E Arnold, October 21, 2022
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