On April 24, President Joe Biden signed a bill that could ban TikTok in the United States if it doesn’t transfer its U.S. operations to an American company. One reason for that: data privacy. Like any social media app, TikTok collects a wealth of data and personal information, and as a Chinese company, there are concerns that it could be forced to provide that data to the Chinese government.
STOP Being Tracked on the Internet! (And Here's How)
“I don’t have a TikTok account,” you might be thinking. “I’m fine.” But the modern internet is more complicated than that. Through ads and deals, data brokers can hide cookies, scripts, and “tracking pixels” on completely unrelated sites and even emails, which they can then use to glean your purchase history and other valuable data. And the culprits extend beyond TikTok: Meta is perhaps the most well-known, and has gone so far as to disclose how it scrapes your data. That means you could be vulnerable to tracking by services like TikTok and Facebook even if you’ve never used them. Fortunately, there are tools that can tell when you’re being tracked and who’s doing it.
There are currently two main methods of online data tracking. The first, cookies, is on the way out, but pixel trackers are a bit more complicated.
You’ve probably heard the term cookies before. They’re small packets of information that allow websites to store data like your password, so you don’t have to log in every time you visit a site. But in addition to these “necessary” cookies, there are also third-party cookies that can track your browsing session, information that can later be sold to data companies.
