Edit: However, tiktok is one of the chattiest apps I've looked at. They have a huge number of tracking/logging/collection endpoints constantly slurping data in the background. See my hosts list which aims to block this:
https://github.com/llacb47/mischosts/blob/master/tiktok-host...
That way it wouldn't be possible for users to block individual hosts to prevent tracking. I guess it's not worth the effort though because laypeople won't care either way?
This. I remember at my last company, we ended up with 8 or 9 different analytics tools all getting different data and showing one or two "cool views" the PM had put together.
It's such a big problem that solutions like segment.io exist to broker your events to N different downstream solutions.
Truly, this is the darkest timeline.
Some content providers don't allow you to view content if you block the advertising hosts.
Then it becomes a matter how you want to deal with failure, do you want the site to break if your ads don't load?
Maybe you just didn't copy anything TikTok was interested in keeping track of. I can think of a lot of really obnoxious things you can do with clipboard data, everything from scanning the contents to collect interests, scanning for URLs, collecting information about what applications are installed. A lot of this could be analyzed on device and it would only update infrequently.
Odds are, like almost every other application it cares about website URLs to deep-link. Pretty much every reddit client does that for instance.