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As others have mentioned, it does depend on what exactly you're defending against. Preemptively opening the link as the sender will send a request to TikTok, but they're not really gaining any useful data there since you just watched the video, hit share (this is what they know so far), and now you opened the link that you had generated. So their database only learned that you shared a video with yourself, which you immediately opened. The more valuable data is when various intended recipients open the link, allowing TikTok to associate you with them to serve more targeted videos based on implicit social graph, etc. Moreover, opening the link yourself to get the "canonical url" protects yourself if you're sharing the link broadly since others can't obtain your name [and potentially more?] from the shortlink. Now, if you're the recipient, there's not much you can do to avoid the tracking link, besides opening it up in as much of an anonymous environment as possible. But interestingly enough, I find the privacy threat greater to the sender. The sender has a TikTok account to aggregate data quite straightforwardly, unlike the recipient. The sender is also being associated with a number of recipients, vs. the recipient with only one sender, and again only through cookies, IP, or something of that sort. |