Topics: News, Joe Rogan, Technology, TikTok, Social Media
Joe Rogan was shocked when he properly read out TikTok’s privacy policy on his podcast.
It’s safe to say the UFC commentator will not be joining the social media platform anytime soon.
As Rogan sat down with comedian Theo Von a few months ago, the podcast host admitted that he had ‘fallen down a TikTok’ rabbit hole the night before.
He said he was horrified when he read the app's ‘crazy’ terms of service and privacy policy.
The clip has since gone viral again, ironically thanks to a TikTok video.
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Rogan told his guest: "This is from TikTok's privacy policy... 'We collect certain information about the device you use to access the platform, such as your IP address, user region, mobile carrier, time zone, identifiers for advertising purpose, the model of your device, the device system, network type."
He continued: "'App and file names and types'. So all the apps and all your file names, all the things you've filed away on your phone, they have access to that.
"'Keystroke patterns or rhythms'. Which means that they know every f*****g thing you type."
The Chinese video-sharing app has been repeatedly accused of intrusive policies and even data harvesting.
A report published by the Australian-US cybersecurity firm Internet 2.0 said that the app doesn’t 'prioritize' user privacy and its overly invasive policies are not ‘necessary’ for the platform to function, as per The Guardian.
The report's author Thomas Perkins said that the app could access various user information while running, including device location, calendar, contacts, other running applications, wi-fi networks and phone numbers.
He wrote: “For the TikTok application to function properly, most of the access and device data collection is not required. This leads us to believe that the only reason this information has been gathered is for data harvesting.
“It is also notable that the device only needs to ask the user for permission to perform each of these actions once and then follow the user’s preferences.”
Co-CEO of Internet 2.0, Robert Potter, also noted how if a user doesn’t grant TikTok permission to access their information, it will continuously ask, according to The Guardian.
But TikTok's Chief Information Security Officer, Roland Cloutier, explained back in 2020 that the data that is collected isn't freely accessible to everyone at the company.
"Similar to industry peers, we will continue to drive our goal of limiting the number of employees who have access to user data and the scenarios where data access is enabled," the statement said.
"Although we already have controls in place to protect user data, we will continue to focus on adding new technologies and programs focused on global data residency, data movement, and data storage access protections worldwide.
"Our goal is to minimize data access across regions so that, for example, employees in the APAC region, including China, would have very minimal access to user data from the EU and US.
