TikTok unlawfully tracks shopping habits and use of dating apps?
86 comments
·December 18, 2025thisisthenewme
mc3301
"The only winning move is not to play."
If you look at these systems that same way some people look at casinos - places specifically designed to take your money - you realize there isn't a way to change them nor improve your overall experience with them. You just don't go inside. I'm kinda hoping that it becomes the trend in the next few decades to completely abandon these algorithm-driven data-hoarding attention-stealing apps. I've been calling it "digital hygiene", personally.
banana_sandwich
I used to be highly addicted to scrolling. Tiktok, reddit, instagram, everything. It nearly cost me my relationship and I swore it off ever since. I’ve been offline those apps for a few months now, and have never felt better. Cant believe what i was allowing to happen to my attention!
cons0le
Its the endless shortform videos. The brain was not meant to switch contexts every 20 seconds for 3 hours straight. I replaced most of my screens with e ink, and only allow myself to scroll through text based sites and rss feeds
mc3301
Youtube: There are a few long-form creators I watch, maybe 4 hours a month of content. Besides that, viewing history is off, no apps, browser extensions block mostly everything (comments, suggestions, etc.)
Instagram: I have a 15 minute daily timer, because I sometimes post, and I sometimes receive DMs.
Reddit: Fully blocked, I think I ublocked everything.
Tiktok: I won't even download it ever again. It has an algorithm like no other for sucking me in. Dangerously addictive.
Facebook? Deleted it completely around 2013, so no idea what's going on there.
safety1st
This is so true. I can't signal boost it enough.
I'm also a recovering social media addict, it was a slow and painstaking transition but the benefits in terms of attention, concentration and attitude have been profound. The main metric for me was going from almost 5 hours a day of phone time 2-3 years ago, to about 1 hour today. Of course the socials still snuck in on other devices but that was the main thing which killed the poison at its root and then eventually all the offshoots withered.
The apps condition you to come back through a feedback loop. Once I broke the feedback loop enough times the whole idea of going into one of these apps or sites and watching my life disappear into it started to feel revolting, like I just knew it was going to make my day worse not better, then the hold was gone.
The next battle I see on my horizon is that I sometimes watch 20-30 minutes of YouTube subscriptions in the morning with my coffee. There's some good content, but sooner or later Google's going to try and kill my ad blocker and probably look for new ways to creep that time up into hours instead of minutes. I know it's coming and I'm ready to die on this hill rather than lose my morning. I will do absolutely anything to continue blocking ads, up to and including saying goodbye to YouTube, to Google, to a web browser, putting only TUI interfaces on my TV, anything.
My favorite small act of defiance this year was purchasing a $120 deluxe hardcover edition of the Lord of the Rings trilogy - that's a great work I enjoy enough that I'm happy to read it many times over the course of my life, it improves my attention span instead of worsening it, and it won't show me a single ad ever. So I figured in terms of recreation, it's one of the best investments I could make. Perhaps several of such omnibuses on a shelf next to a comfortable armchair is the best defense against Big Tech.
bdangubic
6 years and counting for me
fragmede
How'd you do it?
__MatrixMan__
They're not identical concepts, but I've been bringing up "dopamine hygiene" a lot lately and it seems to resonate with people.
Given that these companies tend to converge on addiction as their business model, I think there's a lot of overlap.
Mathnerd314
It seems an absurd amount of people misuse the term dopamine, I found this video https://youtu.be/x6_Ukic1tRM?t=1297 (in Polish, but there are subtitles and dubs). If you want to continue to spread "manipulative disinformation", by all means, some people have to be evil, but just be clear that it is pseudoscience up front.
kibwen
> I've been calling it "digital hygiene", personally.
Don't forget mental hygiene. Letting these apps have access to your brain causes legitimate brain damage in the same way smoking causes lung damage.
mc3301
I said, "next few decades," but I meant to say "next few years."
null
bdangubic
it is possible through legislation. slap them with the fine equal to their two previous years ebita combined and all this stops within an hour. of course not like people that need to pass a legislation aren’t bought for a fraction of that.
these things are why frequent comments on HN that go “this company is not using our data for training, it is in ToS etc…” makes me literally LOL.
noman-land
In the attention economy you have to vote with your attention.
Block, ignore, disengage from, and scorn any software or service that behaves this way.
Make fun of your friends when they use these apps and use peer pressure to dissuade them from using them. These services need to be uncool.
Be the change you want to see. Research alternatives. Provide alternatives. Make alternatives easier, better, and cooler.
Choose principles over convenience and encourage your peers to do the same.
tkel
Pretty sure TikTok and Instagram are sharing data somehow as well. My feeds are near identical.
slg
I don't know, maybe they are colluding, but it is funny to default to that assumption over both platforms just delivering you the same content because you have the same behavior across both apps.
ehnto
They don't have to collude, the third party advertisers that collate and provide shadow profiles do that work for them.
vkou
The advertisers don't get the raw data feeds necessary to do that.
tkel
Notably, this started happening the day that I made my TikTok account public. My Instagram feed began to be a copy of my TikTok feed. The exact same videos. Even after changing my Tiktok back to private and deleting all of my followers, the feeds are still identical, every single day. My behavior is not. On Instagram, I follow and interact with very different accounts than on TikTok. It seems to me that Instagram is buying or accessing TikTok's data, and it is not through advertising providers, because the identical content is coming directly from Instagram/TikTok and not promoted ads.
fragmede
There are three possibilities though. One is Instagram copying TikTok, without their knowledge, the other is Instagram copying your TikTok feed with their knowledge but not their blessing, and finally Instagram copying your TikTok feed with TikTok's knowledge and their blessing. If we take a look at http://TikTok.com/robots.txt, it seems if you make your TikTok public, TikTok is happy to let Instagram take a look at it (but not a number of AI crawlers). What Instagram does with it is up to them, but it's in robots.txt.
yibg
Not sure if they're explicitly sharing data, but there does seem to be something that's sharing data across the platforms. When I buy something from Tiktok, the ads for the same thing shows up on my instagram almost instantly. Doesn't necessarily mean they're directly sharing data of course, could be a third party too. But as a consumer that has very little difference for me.
svat
If you buy something from Tiktok, you presumably visit the merchant's website, which almost surely will have chosen to have a tracking pixel that sends data to FB (Instagram). You can read a bit about how tracking pixels work here: https://jvns.ca/blog/how-tracking-pixels-work/
In this case it's not Tiktok and Instagram that are sharing data with each other, but the product website that is choosing to share data with both of them.
aprilthird2021
It's because you are the exact target demographic consumer for that product, and it's visible in your behavior patterns when using your apps combined with what they know about you (age, sex, location, demographics, etc.)
witnesprotect67
Not so laughable after working in big tech
Legend2440
> TikTok was only able to receive this information with the help of the Israeli data company AppsFlyer and Grindr itself.
So basically, the TikTok app is not spying on your dating apps - your dating apps are willingly selling your information to them, through intermediaries.
This means uninstalling tiktok won’t help. And worse, many other companies are getting your dating info too.
Animats
Grindr had a big data "leak" in 2024.[1] Not a "leak", really, just ordinary reselling of people's gay and HIV status. In 2025, a data broker who resold Grindr data also had a big breach. That wasn't Grindr-specific - it included Temple Run, Subway Surfers, Tinder, Grindr, MyFitnessPal, Candy Crush, Truecaller, 9GAG, Microsoft 365, and others. But not TikTok, because TikTok monetizes that info themselves.
[1] https://thehill.com/business/4614940-grindr-sold-hiv-status-...
[2] https://www.pcmag.com/news/major-data-broker-leak-might-have...
ajdude
Earlier this year I downloaded TikTok once, I needed to access some very niche videos and couldn't watch them without getting an account. I never added anybody, and I never associated with any other socials, but somehow I started getting emails from TikTok that one of my NEIGHBORS were viewing my profile! Even used their full name. I deleted the account and uninstalled the app.
sweca
This is because when you click a shared TikTok link, your account and the sharer's accounts are associated in a social graph. The sharer will see your account as a suggested friend and vice versa.
oefrha
No sharing link needed. Before I deleted my Facebook account more than a decade ago, it was already suggesting random people I met once IRL and are at least two hops away in terms of existing FB relationships. I had very few friends (~20 IIRC).
RandallBrown
TikTok knows where you are and where they are. Easy connection to make.
wkat4242
Do you have to share your location with it? I don't use it but similar apps like Instagram don't have my location permission.
noman-land
yt-dlp will allow you to download individual videos and even entire channels.
wkat4242
Great job from noyb.
It's sad that the gdpr is now being watered down, especially the protection of these specially protected data points.
cheschire
advisedwang
People deserve privacy even if they aren't tech savvy enough to use pi-hole, even when they aren't on a network they control, even if they don't know their privacy is under attack.
OptionOfT
Pi-Hole only works when the tracking / ad scripts are hosted from different domains than the actual content.
cheschire
Don't worry, when you blackhole the entire tiktok domain, you'll still be able to use grindr.
Or did you still want to be able to view tiktok?
Sorry. Can't help you there. Or can I? https://www.torproject.org/download/ or https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/proton-vpn-fast-sec...
lelandfe
TikTok will de-anonymize you and connect you back to the ad networks in days, speaking as someone who tried really, really hard to not get it to do that.
They probably have the most sophisticated fingerprinting ever created.
tkel
Highly recommend people check out this simple alternative. It's like a better, modern dnsmasq.
cheschire
Setting up a whole-home adblocking solution takes a few minutes with pi hole, and it's got a very functional web interface for actions such as unblocking specific sites for specific systems on your network.
That dns proxy looks intriguing but looks like quite a bit different from the simplicity of pi hole.
tkel
dnsproxy is a single binary that does everything, very simple.
ptrl600
I wonder if that "fake permissions" Android sandboxing thing from like a decade ago still works.
The right to lie to apps should be part of the new tech Magna Carta
mac-attack
I hate to sound like a those pesky Kagi supporters, but that is built into Graphene OS.
gruez
It's not, though. If you deny location permissions the app will still know and pester you to enable. Same with other sensitive permissions with the exception of internet.
ikekkdcjkfke
This has been a thing for rooted devices for a long time with faking senstive data on android Although i wouldnt root any sensitive devices nowadays
hekkle
If you want to find which apps are the worst at this use GrapheneOS. Amazon flat out REFUSES to work unless it has unfettered access to everything.
Aurornis
The headline is misleading. The TikTok app isn’t doing the tracking. The dating app providers are selling their user’s data. TikTok is one of the companies buying it.
Technical protections on your phone aren’t going to stop anything if you’re using apps that sell your data from their servers out the back door.
bri3d
This isn’t likely to be a good indicator. Essentially only the network permission and any fingerprint is necessary for the tracking in this accusation; the idea is not that TikTok were spying on Grindr on the device, but that a device fingerprinting firm who broker both TikTok and Grindr data were able to correlate the user.
asdff
Ironically amazon.com works perfectly with javascript disabled. One of the few major sites that still do in my experience.
vjvjvjvjghv
The whole permission thing is broken. They are too broad and nobody understands what they really mean. I would also like to see a log of when and how an app uses granted permissions.
gruez
Doesn't grapheneos have the same permission model as stock android? The only thing it adds is internet access and sensors (eg. gyroscope) access. What extra stuff is amazon asking for?
gerdesj
I (UK based) have pfblocker-ng running at the perimeter with quite a lot of blocking. My browser FF has uBlock Origin and Privacy Badger too.
Amazon works fine.
I suspect they work along the rather practical lines of: if we can snag your data we will but if you want to block our efforts at predation but want to spend out, we are fine with that too.
Amazon absolutely will not refuse your money and they are jolly good at extracting it.
hekkle
Fair enough, it does make sense that they will maximise their profits where they can, I'm just saying that it (the app not the website) refuses to work unless you provide it a full scope of literally every permission available. Maybe it has more to do with attestation, and verifying that you are not a scammer, than stealing and selling data?
null
ZuoCen_Liu
This seems to be the "original sin" of the current Internet "platform" paradigm.
exabrial
Some state needs to pass an explicit consent law, since consent is too hard of a concept for Silicon Valley and other startups to understand.
Vpsteroski
Companies always track data and major social media companies and online search engines ALWAYS keep track of user search history. That data is often sold or used to find out what you are searching about and what brands you like. I guess it IS impossible to stop these big brands :-)
grugagag
Very likely all other social media are doing it. Not to dimish the harm done by Tiktok but sadly it’s an industry wide phenomenon. Shouln’t forget about surveilance, misinformation, election rigginng and so on.
I guess it's pretty much impossible to stop these companies from gathering data, there's too much money in it, it's too easy to implement, and there's no cohesive force to stop them. I'm wondering whether a crowdfunded effort to feed fake data into these systems would work so we overwhelm them and make their plans a bit more difficult.