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Amid a political storm and with an ultimatum from the US government to cut ties with China, the last thing TikTok needed is a scandal related to user privacy.

It is just what he has achieved.

An investigation by the Wall Street Journal indicates that the Android version of the TikTok app used a vulnerability in Google's operating system for 15 months to obtain the MAC address of the phones of the users of the platform.

The MAC number is a unique identifier associated with network interfaces, such as WiFi chips, modems for access to telephone networks or Bluetooth. It is a set of 12 hexadecimal numbers arranged in pairs that allows identifying a specific device on the network.

Most operating systems, including Android, have prohibited apps from accessing this number for years to prevent users from being individually identified.

TikTok, however, would have taken advantage of a flaw in the Android code, active until last November, to circumvent this restriction.

The MAC number was used to better identify users and thus offer advertising much more effectively. TikTok encrypted the information once it was extracted before sending it to its servers, a tactic that could be designed to prevent Google from noticing the theft of the number.

Once on the servers of ByteDance, the Chinese company that owns TikTok, the number was associated with the user's profile along with other data.

Although the app gives the option of erasing all traces of personal information in an account, the fact of using the MAC number as part of the identifying data set would have made the process of reconstructing the information about tastes and preferences of a certain user trivial. Changing the MAC number of a device is possible, but it is a complex process, especially in mobile environments.

Last week, US President Donald Trump issued an executive order that would prohibit US companies and citizens from doing business with Bytedance.

In the order, the president makes explicit mention of the danger posed by the systematic collection of data by TikTok due to the close ties of Chinese companies with the government of the country.

Trump has given 45 days for the ban to take effect, which could be avoided if a North American company acquired the business. Microsoft and Twitter have shown interest in this possibility and are negotiating with Bytedance the purchase of TikTok.

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