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Comment by ajdude | Hacker News Reader

Earlier this year I downloaded TikTok once, I needed to access some very niche videos and couldn't watch them without getting an account. I never added anybody, and I never associated with any other socials, but somehow I started getting emails from TikTok that one of my NEIGHBORS were viewing my profile! Even used their full name. I deleted the account and uninstalled the app.

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I had a creepy one like this happen to me with Linkedin. I sold my uncle's guitar on craigslist using a throwaway gmail address to a guy with a very unique, rhyming name that I would never forget (ie - Gerald Herald). Immediately after he left with the guitar linkedin suggests I add him to my professional network. I never logged in to linkedin from that gmail, never looked this guy up, don't have linkedin app installed on my phone, literally met him for 60 seconds to get cash and hand over a guitar. It still weirds me out.

Did you both have location on? Were you both connected to the same wifi?

Did he do any research on you beforehand?

Did you and him both search the same guitar model, in the same days, while in the same area?

This is because when you click a shared TikTok link, your account and the sharer's accounts are associated in a social graph. The sharer will see your account as a suggested friend and vice versa.

No sharing link needed. Before I deleted my Facebook account more than a decade ago, it was already suggesting random people I met once IRL and are at least two hops away in terms of existing FB relationships. I had very few friends (~20 IIRC).

Id suggest FB & co also uses location tracking & proximity to expand their social graph continuosly? Most people just dont care about these privacy settings, and if you have a vast number of users, it doesnt matter if ther are 10% "techsavy people" because the mass is just big enough to create profiles on which you then easily can compute/guess other connections & joints in the social graph.

Yes, that’s my assumption, although IIRC I never gave FB location permissions, so it might be temporarily sharing an IP address by being on the same WiFi or something. Come to think of it they had access to WiFi SSIDs as well in the early days even when location permissions were off.

yt-dlp will allow you to download individual videos and even entire channels.

TikTok knows where you are and where they are. Easy connection to make.

Do you have to share your location with it? I don't use it but similar apps like Instagram don't have my location permission.

Wifi ssids around you might be enough.

That shouldn't be accessible without location permission, that loophole was fixed a long time ago.

Cell tower data is readily available for a modest price. It's not hard to triangulate someone with "good enough" accuracy for marketing purposes.

Also, the world is filled with millions of Bluetooth-logging devices. They're everywhere from department stores (to monitor foot traffic) to the side of the road (to monitor traffic speed).

Reading cell towers also is supposed to be behind the location tracking flag. Including bluetooth by the way, which is why so many apps need this permission these days to even link a BLE device.

And tracking bluetooth emissions shouldn't matter as they are randomised while not in an active connection.

You're looking at it from the wrong end.

Even without location they can get a pretty good idea of your location from your IP address or any other signals. Their neighbor also might have allowed access to their phonebook or something like that to make the connection obvious.

I uninstalled it after about half an hour of use when it became clear the app kept pushing me to watch videos with Andrew Tate (with him on the top half of the screen and random racing games on the bottom half). It’s dystopian.

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