This is an archived article and the information in the story may be outdated. Please check the time stamp on the story to see when it was updated last.
All apps are not create equal. Some are innocent — you pay for them, they deliver a service, and they maintain your privacy. Unfortunately, other apps, including many that are free, consider the user to be the product and do not abide by the same principles. The very act of downloading them and using them, regardless of how innocent they seem, could put you at a higher security risk. Privacy Expert Heinrich Long at Restore Privacy spoke to SHEFinds.com about the one app you should delete from your iPhone to keep your phone from getting hacked.
Facebook may be the app that alerted us to the fact that some of the most popular apps are misusing our data, but it’s far from the only one doing so. You may have heard that President Trump and his advisors consider TikTok, the incredibly popular video-sharing app, a national security threat and are looking into banning TikTok until the Chinese company can partner with U.S. companies. As it turns out, TikTok is also a potential private threat for users.
“For now, I would 100 percent delete TikTok,” Long says. “Until the transition over to the U.S. is finalized and we know for sure that our information isn’t fed to the Chinese government, you need to delete it.”
TikTok gathers a ton of data on its users. The hugely popular app collects location data, info about your phone model and operating system, data on which videos users are watching and commenting on, and even the keystroke rhythms people use when they type.
At first the assumption was that TikTok funnels users' data to third-party advertisers so that they can better target users as customers. This alone is sketchy enough, and similar to the way Facebook uses our data. But speculation that the Chinese government could be spying on U.S. TikTok users has raised even more red flags (TikTok claims its data is collected and stored outside of China).
Long insists that it is within our best interests to simply cut ourselves off from TikTok until privacy issues are sorted out. “As we probably all know by now, TikTok, not unlike many Chinese-made devices — like Huawei phones, for example — are essentially Chinese spyware, so a lot of information they shouldn’t be collecting (like your clipboard contents, for example) ends up in the hands of the Chinese government,” Long says.
It's better to be safe than sorry. If you can avoid using TikTok, it may be one of the best things you do to protect your online security.
