After Facebook, Instagram, and Google, TikTok is the next platform to develop into an infamous spying app. According to a recent study by software expert Felix Krause, TikTok may track your online activity even if you surf other websites using the app.
Fastlane, an organization that tests apps, was founded by Krause and was acquired by Google five years ago. Forbes was the first to report the researcher’s findings.
Read more: Instagram removes TikTok-like feautures afters complaints
How does it work?
The study demonstrates that TikTok can add code to the websites you visit via a link in the app. Since these websites are opened in the in-app browser rather than Chrome or Safari, the code alters them to permit surveillance.
This allows the Chinese app to monitor your keystrokes and clicks on the website. TikTok could easily use this to steal personal information like credit card numbers and passwords.
Krause commented on his findings saying:
“This was an active choice the company made. This is a non-trivial engineering task and it does not happen by mistake or randomly.”
Although Tiktok declined a request for comment, it did confirm to Forbes that this code does indeed exist in the in-app browser of TikTok. The spokesman did add, though, that the app does not use the code to monitor users online.
Read more: Pakistan’s 1.2 crore videos on TikTok were inappropriate
“Like other platforms, we use an in-app browser to provide an optimal user experience, but the Javascript code in question is used only for debugging, troubleshooting and performance monitoring of that experience like checking how quickly page loads or whether it crashes.”
TikTok said that this code is part of a third-party software development kit (SDK) and it includes features that TikTok does not use.