The social media TikTok and YouTube are the most avid collectors of data about their users.

While Google's offshoot YouTube uses them primarily for its own purposes, especially for placing appropriate ads, China's TikTok passes them on to third parties. What will happen next is difficult to estimate, according to URL Genius , an Internet advertising agency that conducted a recent study on the topic.

Source: URL GENIUS
Source: URL GENIUS

An average of six network contacts

For the research, URL Genius used Apple's iOS's "Record App Activity" feature to count how many different domains tracked a user's activity across ten different social media apps - YouTube, TikTok, Twitter, Telegram, LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, Messenger, and WhatsApp—track over the course of a visit before you even log into your account.
YouTube and TikTok outperformed the other apps with 14 network contacts each, significantly more than the average number of six network contacts. Ten of the YouTube trackers were first-party network contacts, meaning the platform tracked user activity for its own purposes. Four of the contacts came from third-party domains, meaning the social platform allowed a handful of mysterious external parties to collect information and track user activity accordingly.

TikTok collects for third parties

For TikTok, the results were even clearer: 13 of the 14 network contacts on the popular social media app came from third parties. Third-party tracking occurred even when users did not opt ​​in to allow tracking in each app's settings, URL Genius said in its analysis. “Users of the platforms cannot currently see what data is shared with third-party networks or how their data is used,” write the study authors. According to CNBC, TikTok's privacy policy allows users' personal information to be shared with its Chinese parent company. On the other hand, TikTok promises to protect sensitive user data.


Sources:

New Research Across 200 iOS Apps Hints that Surveillance Marketing is Still Going Strong

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