TikTok collected device identifiers for over a year in violation of Android policies

Aug 11 2020 by The Verge

 
Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

TikTok’s Android app collected users’ MAC addresses for 18 months in violation of the platform rules, as discovered by a Wall Street Journal investigation on Tuesday. The addresses would have served as a unique identifier for each user’s device, making them valuable for both advertising and potentially more invasive forms of tracking.

By 2015, both iOS’s App Store and the Google Play Store had banned the collection of MAC addresses as...

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