Guy Who Reverse-Engineered TikTok Reveals the Scary Things He Learned

Re:Guy Who Reverse-Engineered TikTok Reveals the Scary Thing... by tgsovlerkhgsel on Monday June 29, 2020 @11:58PM (#23686393)

"Other apps you have installed" is also extremely revealing about the user's interests and thus very valuable for ad serving. And equally privacy invasive. Think about pregnancy tracker or religious scripture apps. The OS should not expose this data within the sandbox of other apps by a different developer.

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Re:Guy Who Reverse-Engineered TikTok Reveals the Scary Thing... by est on Tuesday June 30, 2020 @12:03AM (#23686416)

> "Other apps you have installed" is also extremely revealing about the user's interests

Yes, ads SDK across different apps can provide detailed aggregated information. Also apps promote each other, the "channel distribution" is huge business and relies on apps acknowledge each other.

I highly doubt many of the Tiktok reverse-engineering result may turn out to be some thirdparty ads or anti-fraud SDKs which Chinese companies use often.

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Re:Guy Who Reverse-Engineered TikTok Reveals the Scary Thing... by tgsovlerkhgsel on Tuesday June 30, 2020 @12:07AM (#23686442)

Yes, the ads SDKs are another thing that are ripe for "disruption". And by disruption, I mean the DPAs fining and every app developer that uses any of them until the SDKs stop doing that.

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