TikTok claimed to track user data, violating Google privacy policies

According to the Wall Street Journal, TikTok is said to have designed a mechanism to circumvent the privacy safeguard in Google’s Android operating system to collect unique identifiers from mobile devices, which is data that allows the app to track users online without allowing them to opt out. Forbes reports that TikTok was hiding the practice from Google until November 2019, and now indicates that ‘the current version of TikTok does not collect MAC addresses’. In response to this report, US Senator Josh Hawley has called on Google to remove TikTok from its platform.