Sydney: After India and the US, it is Australia now who is mulling over ban TikTok as they too fear the app was being misused by the Chinese government to collect users’ data.
Several Australian legislators have come forward with the proposal to ban the Chinese app, reported South China Morning Post.
It also reported that though the TikTok owner ByteDance have constantly claimed that its data is stored in servers in the US and Singapore but it is not a difficult task for the Chinese government to get access to the data.
India officially banned as many as 59 apps owned by Chinese tech companies or Chinese developers, more countries are now looking at banning Chinese owned apps as well.
TikTok collects data through surveys, competitions and challenges, and infers extra details about users in order to personalise content and advertising. It also collects all kinds of technical information from your phone, which is the point in the privacy policy where most people’s eyes start to glaze over. They share information with other platforms and organisations, sometimes including law enforcement where compelled to by law. None of this is new or unusual for social media platforms. Perhaps the most notable recent issue arose when the Apple iOS 14 beta privacy feature caught TikTok secretly reading users’ clipboards.
