Hacker News Reader

Comment by jareklupinski | Hacker News Reader

What data? Which videos I watched for how long :P

This info is extremely telling in more ways that you are giving it credit for, and if maybe you really don't do anything more than watch cat videos, other people are watching more than that. Lot's of data can be inferred based on your browsing history.

maybe which profiles or link trees people are looking at. Any questionable content anyone likes. They might be able to use it to deploy 0 days to specified users they might be interested in. Maybe users who work for the gov, or companies they're interested in getting information about.

Hard to know without having them spell out their specific security concerns.

you can do all of those things without a billion dollar company... seems like a waste to just use it for breaking into teenagers' phones...

TikTok is mostly adults now.

idk if you can do all of that. Having one app that is just kind of a general purpose offensive option against any given US target seems handy.

Don't the security permissions of TickTick give it full access to the device storage? Doesn't it have access to device location?

Seems to me it's able to copy almost anything it wants out of the phone.

> Seems to me it's able to copy almost anything it wants out of the phone.

On Android? Probably.

On iPhone? That's not how iPhones work

TikTok's privacy policies include the ability to store biometric information. They have been caught bypassing privacy controls on iOS and Android before to collect data that they're not supposed to have access to, and they even settled a lawsuit a couple of years ago for illegally storing data of minors.

what biometric information? I don't remember tiktok asking me for my fingerprint before I could start watching videos... does it do that now?

TikTok has access to your camera and microphone, and facial recognition and voiceprinting are considered biometric information.

You can block the permission in settings, but as explained in the FCC letter, TikTok has a documented pattern of bypassing system permissions and accessing data that they shouldn't actually be able to access (which is malware-like behavior).

If TikTok can actually access the camera and microphone after permission has been denied, then Apple and Google have a much bigger issue on their hands and need to fix that ASAP.

Read the letter. It's talking about past issues. Yes, security exploits are a problem for the platform, but that's no excuse for apps to exploit them maliciously, against the user's knowledge or wishes.

They could produce some very high-quality facial recognition data, thats biometric as well

that's fair, I denied the app permission to access my camera since I just watch videos on it

it would be really helpful for the FCC to explain to content creators why and how their biometric information can be used against them, tiktok is just one of the companies scanning their faces in that regard

biometrics including face and voice prints, your phone contacts, your location etc

Is location actually considered biometric? I'd have thought that's PII, but not biometric.

there are commas separating items - the first item is biometrics. Your phone contacts aren't biometrics either.

good thing I keep a piece of tape over my camera :)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com