What’s your take on TikTok and privacy concerns?

[danielmartinhq 0]

I keep running into debates about TikTok. Some people see it as just another social platform like YouTube or Instagram, while others think it collects way more data than it should and poses bigger risks.

What’s interesting is that lately, apps like TikTok 18 are also showing up in discussions about privacy and data handling. It’s basically a modified version of TikTok that gives access to more adult or restricted content, but it doesn’t come from official sources — which makes it even harder to verify what kind of data it collects or where it sends it.

So I’m wondering if the real risk isn’t just from TikTok itself, but also from these unofficial versions floating around. Do you think TikTok (and apps like TikTok 18) are genuine privacy threats, or are they being exaggerated compared to other big platforms? And how do you see their overall impact on internet culture and security awareness?

Edited ... by danielmartinhq

[Tech Jedi Alex 1496]

Reminds me of that one time I had a modified version of WhatsApp running, WhatsApp Plus or WhatsApp+ it was called. The dev was one Dr. Mounib Al Rifai who stopped development upon receiving a Cease and Desist letter from the originals. It was possible to hide one's online status with that version (or monitor the online status of your contacts), send files bigger than the size limit, completely change colors, backgrounds and even some aspects of the UI layout, it introduced an image and GIF search feature to use as profile and group avatars and in messages, allowed opening a conversation with numbers you don't have in your contacts and so, so much more. It was wild. It directly appealed to Android power users back then who modded the hell out of their phones with all the custom ROMs available at the time and all the wild features they introduced, also YouTube Vanced, WhatsApp+, of course, and the advent of Telegram introducing ingenious new things to instant messaging, copied by later messengers. Those were some mighty good times for Android power users. I know I enjoyed the heck out of it.

Even in that time, people always asked "who are the people behind those apps, can we trust them not to put malware in their work and by extension on our phones". The risk of installing the wrong thing is always there, even with modified clients for TikTok; after all, for someone excited it might not be clear that the original can only be found on specialized forums, not on fancy websites SEO'd to the death to be on the first result page.
In the past, if an app or tool was introduced on the XDA Forums or 4PDA and got some good feedback, it could generally be considered safe (as in, it's probably not malware; privacy is not a modder's concern). Personally, I generally followed the rule: "Original modding projects rarely have a dedicated website, much less a fancy one", because every damn project worth its salt only ever communicated via forums or some code repository. All the modding apps I know published on XDA (like XPosed Framework, SuperSU, Magisk) or GitHub (like Shizuku, Shamiko) for a very simple reason: To not have hosting expenses, and to be seen by likeminded individuals, not search engines. XPosed and TWRP are one of those rares who have or had a rather simple website.

Comparing my experience to the presentation of protiktok18.com, my verdict is a tendency to avoid it. Especially if the website for some reason crows about how important trust & safety is to them, and that the download is "fully scanned to ensure your protection" and "safe", the latter appearing 9 times on the front page. You're not appealing to modders like that; It's like, people who know what they're doing are not even the target audience with this one…