A developer discovered that TikTok can track the activity of its users on web pages

Chinese video platform tik tok It continues to be news for issues referring to Their use of personal data They were collected by their app, and a software researcher said they monitor user activity on their smartphones.

With just a few lines of code the app “injects” into mobile phones, the platform will be able to Track browsing activity even Monitor what users type on their phones.

Felix Krause, a software researcher and founder of Fastlane, an app testing and publishing service that Google acquired five years ago, explained that activity tracking is possible because this social network (as well as others like Instagram) has its own browser.

When TikTok users enter a website via an in-app link, TikTok inserts a file Code that can monitor a lot of activity on those external sitesIncluding what they press on the screen and the letters, words and text they enter.

In this way, the application of the Asian giant will have the ability to monitor the behavior of users on the Internet thanks to the modifications that it makes to websites through the company’s browser.

According to Krause, TikTok can track this activity by injecting lines from the JavaScript programming language into websites visited within the app, and creating new commands that alert TikTok about user behavior.

For example, when people Click ads on TikTok or visit creator profile linksThe app does not open this link within a mobile browser, such as Chrome or Safari, but by default it opens the app browser that was created by them.

TikTok guarantees that this information will not be used

Although they realized from the platform that those lines that Krause mentioned are already inside the code, They confirmed that they are not being used to track the activity of any of their users in the browser.

The company explained that JavaScript code is part of a third-party software development kit, or SDK, which is a set of tools used to create or maintain applications. The SDK includes these features that the app does not use.

However, in his research, Krause tested Seven iPhone apps that use this type of browser within the platform: TikTok, Facebook, Facebook Messenger, Instagram, Snapchat, Amazon and Robinhood. The results showed that only TikTok appears to be monitoring keystrokes.

Also, like the Chinese app, Instagram and Facebook track every click users make on websites and also monitor when people highlight text on the pages they visit.