A report published on Friday suggests that the megapopular China-owned social media application TikTok was spying on users through a vulnerability in the latest version of Apple’s iOS smartphone firmware.
According to a report by Forbes, the popular social media platform TikTok may have been spying on millions of users by spying on data copied to their iPhones’ clipboard through a vulnerability in the latest iOS smartphone firmware.
The vulnerability, which allows application developers to access a user’s clipboard, data was modified on June 23 by Apple. Now, users will be prompted with a notification when an application gains access to their clipboard data.
A representative from TikTok told Forbes that the issue occurred as a result of a feature that was implemented to prevent spam on the platform.
According to TikTok, the issue is now “triggered by a feature designed to identify repetitive, spammy behavior,” and has told me that it has “already submitted an updated version of the app to the App Store removing the anti-spam feature to eliminate any potential confusion.” In other words: We’ve been caught doing something we shouldn’t, we’ve rushed out a fix.
TikTok claims that the clipboard access issues were triggered by an older version of the Google advertising SDK.
“The clipboard access issues,” the TikTok representative added, “showed up due to third-party SDKs, in our case an older version Google Ads SDK, so we do not get access to the information through this (presumably they do but we cannot speak to that). We are in the processes of updating so that the third-party SDK will no longer have access.”
Breitbart News reported at the beginning of June that children spend almost as much time on TikTok as they do on YouTube. The report revealed that children approximately 80 minutes on each application every day.
