Are you looking for shoes, train tickets or health problems? Your web activity is tracked by numerous digital “cookies” on millions of sites. They belong in particular to Google and Facebook, which record your digital wanderings to offer you better online advertising. But TikTok is now very present at his side, according to a survey published by the American consumer association Consumer Reports.
To understand the scope of the phenomenon, the Consumer Reports study analyzed 20,000 websites, including 1,000 of the most popular across the Atlantic. Result: hundreds of them use the “TikTok pixel”, a piece of computer code to record the visit of each Internet user to a web page in question. The information collected refers, for example, to the user’s IP address, but also to a unique identification number, assigned by TikTok, to build a complete and traceable profile.
Sometimes sensitive information
On Facebook, Google, such as TikTok, this information is markers to deliver targeted advertising on one of their platforms, such as Facebook, Instagram, or Gmail. For their part, brands that agree to integrate this “pixel” can purchase this advertising to convince a customer that they have spent time on their website, but also for statistical analysis purposes.
In order to accumulate as much information as possible, Facebook, Google and TikTok cookies create a file for each Internet user. For those who use their service, to find them later and send them targeted advertising, but also for everyone else, whose IP addresses and habits remain listed in this way.
As Consumer Reports reminds us, this information is far from trivial, when TikTok’s partner sites host pages whose consultation can tell a lot about the Internet user. Among the examples of partners cited, the famous diet brand Weight Watchers, American family planning or a site that disseminates information on erectile dysfunction. And this while TikTok’s terms of use theoretically prohibit its partners from providing you with health-related information.
While these practices are common and long known with respect to Facebook and Google, they raise new questions with respect to TikTok: Despite the app’s success, the number of Westerners who don’t use it and are likely to be tracked in spite of themselves is much more important. In addition, the company transmits data to China, without ever specifying which ones. Like many Chinese tech companies, it has also signed cooperation commitments with its government.
Source: BFM TV
