TikTok is owned by the Chinese multinational internet company ByteDance, which is headquartered in Beijing. Does TikTok have connections with the Chinese government? “We believe the justification system iOS implements systematically limits a culture of ‘grab what you can’ in data harvesting, “ the report states. It has a justification system so that if a developer wants access to something it must justify why this is required before it is granted. Most of the concern in the report focuses on permissions sought on Android devices, because Apple’s iOS significantly limits what information an app can gather. This leads us to believe that the only reason this information has been gathered is for data harvesting,” it concluded. “The application can and will run successfully without any of this data being gathered. The report labelled the app’s data collection practices “overly intrusive” and questioned their purpose. “If you tell Facebook you don’t want to share something, it won’t ask you again.
When a user doesn’t give it permission … persistently asks. “When the app is in use, it has significantly more permissions than it really needs,” said Robert Potter, co-CEO of Internet 2.0 and one of the editors of the report.
