No, not really. Like Facebook or Google, TikTok's revenue comes from selling ads. The advertisement business quite literally is based on how much personal info they can gather on yourself, and how they can leverage it to allow themselves and third parties to exploit that info to make you more vulnerable to their goals.
As far as I care, letting random people know random facts about me so that they're more likely to peddle me stuff that I actually like is not "exploitation", but that's merely an opinion.
No, not really. No one uses a platform like TikTok because they are eager to share their personal data to marketers, and most are entirely oblivious even to which personal data is the service gathering on them.
Just because a platform or service or system is free to access that does not mean that we are allowing mysterious third parties to spy on us.
When you lose privacy willingly saying "but I have nothing to hide" you also lose the ability to hide from bad actors.
You may come up with the hyperboles you wish, but the truth of the matter is that a) these companies spy on their user base, b) they don't divulge or inform you about how they spy on you, c) they obviously do not defend you or have your best interests in mind, d) they don't even clarify what they do or intend to do with the data they gather on you nor ask for your informed consent about anything.
I recall reading a case study over a decade ago about how a dad learned his daughter was pregnant because Target was sending her ads to register for a baby because she was buying things people buy early in their pregnancy like pre-natal vitamins.
That's like saying that providing people with groceries is the secondary purpose of grocery stores, the first being collecting money in exchange for them.
Duh! How horrible! Everyone would be better off if they just grew their own food on their own farm, like in the good old days
Saying TikTok is the "worst" thing is absurd given the article we're discussing. The people clearly see value for them in TikTok that hasn't been provided by other services, and adding that to the Internet is unambiguously great.
So the value to the users TikTok brings is unique and novel, whereas any potential harm to the users doesn't really change (as everyone and their grandma are collecting all the data already).
Yesterday, an average user had, say, 11 data-collecting apps — and today, it's 12. It's not great, but very little changes for the user. Hardly the worst thing IMO.