The Lesson We’re Learning From TikTok? It’s All About Our Data

Whether or not TikTok’s code was doing something nefarious, there is a broader lesson here. As increasingly digital creatures, we often don’t think twice about giving the apps that we love permanent access to information about ourselves. So the debate about TikTok is a reminder that we must be on guard about the data we share with any apps — whether it’s from an American or a Chinese company — and get in the habit of denying their requests to our personal data.

“We should be minimizing the amount of data we share,” Mr. Jackson said. “It doesn’t matter who collects it in the first place.”

Here’s what you can do to set up your app defenses.

Minimize data sharing.

When you open a newly installed app on your phone, notifications may pop up asking for permission for access to sensors and data such as your camera, photo album, location and address book.

When that happens, ask yourself these questions:

• Does this app need access to my data or sensor for it to work properly?

• Does the app need access to this sensor or data all the time or just temporarily?

• Do I trust this company with my data?

Sometimes it makes sense to grant access. An app like Google Maps, for example, needs to know your location so it can figure out where you are and give directions.

In other instances, the need is less clear.

GasBuddy, an app that helps you find nearby gas stations with the lowest prices, asks for permission to know your location. You could allow it to pull your device’s precise location from its GPS sensor. But it would be safer just to enter your ZIP code so it has less precise information about your whereabouts. (A 2018 Times investigation found that GasBuddy was one of dozens of apps that shared users’ location data with third parties.)

Then there is the question of whether an app needs permanent access to our data and sensors — meaning it always has permission to get information like our location and photos even when we are not using features related to that data.

Usually the answer is no. As a brand-new TikTok user, for example, I had granted it permanent access to my phone’s camera and microphone. But I have mostly used the app to scroll through people’s cooking videos and have posted only two videos. And the app doesn’t really need to know that much about me. So I eventually went into the settings to disable access to those sensors.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/26/technology/personaltech/tiktok-data-apps.html