India has decided to ban 59 of China’s biggest mobile apps, including TikTok and Alibaba’s UC Browser, with the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology alleging they are breaching the privacy of Indian users and mining their data.
“The compilation of these data, its mining and profiling by elements hostile to national security and defence of India…is a matter of very deep and immediate concern which requires emergency measures,” the Ministry said.
Previously security researchers revealed that data copied to the clipboard on an iOS device could be read by any active app, and TikTok was found to be one of them actively exploiting this.
Bytedance, the owner of TikTok, responded that the security breaches were related to the use of an outdated Google advertising SDK, and that SDK is in the process of being replaced. However, recent findings are contradictory to this claim as TikTok appears to continue to access users’ clipboards, despite the original issue being fixed.
Apple has theoretically fixed this problem in a beta version of iOS 14, which warns users whenever any app reads the last thing copied to the clipboard. However, users will need to upgrade to iOS 14 to benefit from this protection. Since this announcement TikTok has been shown to still be abusing user data via accessing the clipboard on iOS devices. The status of this issue on Android platform is currently unknown.
The United States is currently considering also banning Chinese social media apps, including TikTok.
