
Ask HN: Is tiktok reading and uploading user contact as it is doing in China? - jerryzh
A China user prosecuted Tiktok for it read and uploaded users contact without permission and it is not mentioned in its privacy statement.
The Tiktok claimed in the court that contact is not private. The information stored in contact is information of society members instead of personal privacy and should be allowed to use freely.
This statement is so ridiculous that I took it as April fool&#x27;s day&#x27;s joke at first sight but it turns out to be true.
I have heard that Tiktok has been unexpectedly successful abroad so I am wondering whether its terrifying claim is a result of China&#x27;s poor protection of privacy or it is just such a terrible company.
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koboll
Why anyone would trust an app from China with any of their data is beyond me.
The firewalls between business and government that we take for granted in the
West simply don't exist there, and the PRC leverages the widespread ignorance
of this to its advantage.

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Calamity
Indeed, in the west we are lucky (in some sense) that our tech is big enough
that it is able to band together and stand up against unreasonable demands
from the government.

In China, I can't imagine Huawei/Tencent/etc refusing to help the government
break into someone's phone or create a backdoor into an "encrypted" chat.

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slezyr
> Indeed, in the west we are lucky (in some sense) that our tech is big enough
> that it is able to band together and stand up against unreasonable demands
> from the government.

I assume microsoft isn't big enough, because it was stripping encryption from
Skype and making it centralized.

~~~
Calamity
As far as I know, Skype is E2EE..

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oarsinsync
> The Tiktok claimed in the court that contact is not private ... I am
> wondering whether its terrifying claim is a result of China's poor
> protection of privacy or it is just such a terrible company

Based on this[0] conversation thread, there is at least some agreement of the
view that contact information doesn't qualify as private information, and is
fair game.

Personally, I disagree, but then I'm not part of the ad-driven economy, so
it's easy for me to not need to vote against my own source of income.

[0][https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20214564](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20214564)

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yuanchenxi95
Toutiao(another product of Bytedance - the owner of Tiktok) has announced a
clarification of the statement:
[https://ibb.co/RHH8JT5](https://ibb.co/RHH8JT5). Toutiao disagree entirely
with the statement that the contact information is not part of the users'
privacy.

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stevenicr
Another question in regards to tiktok (and other android apps) - I got an
email saying that a kid I help mentor had given tiktok access to their gmail
account (something like that).

Does this mean that a default install asks permission to access and read your
gmail, and that would mean they could harvest all of your contacts, and emails
sent / recvd, maybe calendar stuff too?

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Calamity
Something makes me feel that it is down to their general approach to privacy
and not just the portion of it that is "within China".

