TikTok’s Stalkerware Ads

“I think the very word stalking implies that you're not supposed to like it. Otherwise, it would be called 'fluffy harmless observation time'.”

Author Molly Harper

​TikTok was already a privacy nightmare:

• The EU fined it $600 million for breaching data privacy rules.
• An FCC commissioner asked Apple and Google to remove the app from their stores because of mounting evidence that China had access to all user data.
• The FBI opened an investigation into alleged use of the app to track American journalists.

To this troubling list we can now add the following: In violation of the platform’s own policies, sellers are using TikTok to market GPS trackers to stalkers, reports Rosie Thomas of 404 Media.

“Unlike AirTags,”one vendor boasts, “this thing doesn’t make a sound, doesn’t send alerts, she will never know it’s there.” In the comments section of a similar ad, one user bragged, “I bought some and put it on cars of girls I find attractive at the gym.”

Lest there be any doubt, Thomas’ report quotes Eva Galperin at the Electronic Frontier Foundation: “This is absolutely being framed as a tool of abuse.” Galperin, co-founder of a non-profit that keeps tabs on such products, categorizes these products broadly as “stalkerware.”

The central legal and moral issue underlying stalking, as with all violations of privacy, is consent. Expert Market’s page summarizing GPS tracking laws by state underscores the point: The word “consent” appears in these laws 115 times.

When asked about the viral proliferation of ads for these tracker tools, TikTok told 404 Media that they “prohibit the sale of concealed video or audio recording devices on our platform.” And yet, Thomas and her colleagues continued to find such ads every time they looked.
​
Which, of course, should come as a surprise to absolutely no one. This is just one more good reason why President Trump should cease suspending the law requiring TikTok to be sold or shuttered.

DONATE & HELP US PROTECT YOUR PRIVACY RIGHTS