Does tiktok actually collect that much (valuable) information? It seems all the scaremongering people spread (rightfully or not) is around it's moderation and attempts to steer discourse and change opinions to pro-china?
I think the real concern that isn't being said out loud is that it's fear of TikTok's ability to distribute information, and that the US government doesn't have management under their thumb.
Yeah to me seems they rather buy data, so in the app I see ads about things things I've looked for somewhere else. Never seen it other way around, but maybe it is more subtle - YouTube Shorts and TikTok have a huge overlap in content for me, but does it mean YouTube buys my data from TikTok?
It's far worse than just data collection. At least at one point in time Tiktok's client was disassembled enough to reveal that it had a function to download an unsigned binary blob and run it on the device. They're able to bypass app store protections completely...
