TikTok Is Nothing But A Spyware, Claimed Reddit CEO

In a conference this week, Steve Huffman, CEO of well-known forum Reddit has mentioned TikTok as “fundamentally parasitic”, and referred the app as spyware. His growing concerns actually comes from the fact that the app takes advantage of users’ fingerprints to track their behaviors. 

In a response to a question of which lessons the startups can learn from the success of Tiktok, he refused the “level of thinking” of TikTok creators, and actively warned people to stay away from the spyware app on their phones like TikTok. 

There are some things to be noticed from his concerns. TikTok was reported by Rufposten to use browser-based and audio-based trackers, which its parent company Bytedance mentioned that the purpose is to determine suspicious browser behaviors. In addition, the US government has worked on an investigation into TikTok after some rising concerns of data storage from their purchase of Musical.ly.

Huffman is not the only person who has suspected TikTok. In an NBC interview, Sheryl Sandberg from Facebook agreed that there will be a lot of issues to be concerned about when TikTok is from a Chinese company.

It is clear that although Reddit and TikTok both do not have the same social direction, they are all competing for similar audience groups, which are everyone. And there must be some agreement regarding the dislike of TikTok. Sandberg mentioned that Facebook already began to notice the sudden rise of TikTok for being a growing competitor in the business. In the world where the media is competing with each other to win audience attention, the fact that TikTok is getting more and more favor from the youth when picking up their phones, as well as their fast pace and growing quantity in the number of users than ever is considerably worrying, at least for Facebook. 

During an interview, Evan Spiegel, CEO of Snapchat agreed that TikTok could grow even bigger than Instagram. The reason, as he thought, is the attractiveness of talent-based content than normal status-based one. He is one of very few social media experts who did not throw a hostile look on TikTok, as well as the parent company.

In fact, Huffman’s view is not totally welcomed. Some said he just wanted to take advantage of the heat from the Reddit users, who are accusing him of hypocrisy for the scrutiny of TikTok, a Chinese-owned company. Not to mention that Tencent, a Chinese company, is owning a stake in Reddit right now.

In a response to Huffman’s claim, TikTok spokesperson in an interview with TechCrunch said that all accusations are baseless, and there is no evidence that supports the claim.