手机APP打开了你的麦克风

TikTok is a video-sharing platform where users can post all sorts of short videos ranging from 15 seconds to 1 minute long. A wide variety of videos are on the platform, such as dancing, memes, gaming, et cetera. But Apple’s operating system, iOS 14, revealed that TikTok is actually accessing your microphone while you’re not recording or creating a video. It is even accessing your microphone while the app is only in the background. iOS 14 has an orange dot on the status bar indicating if your microphone is being used by one or more apps, and lots of people online have noticed that the dot appears as soon as TikTok is launched. A lot of websites and applications collect all sorts of information about you in order to feed you content you are interested in, but this is particularly creepy because they will literally be able to hear you while the app is in use. My classmate had a similar experience. She had TikTok open in the background and she was talking to her friend about building a computer. After she reopened TikTok, her feed began to include lots of stuff regarding computers. This is probably not a coincidence. I think that this isn’t completely unexpected, but it is also pretty creepy. I mean, if they have access to your microphone, they might have access to a lot of other stuff like your camera, location, passwords, private information, etc. As we’re being more and more advanced in terms of technology, we also need to be more careful about what permissions we give to what applications, and just be mindful about security in general.