[valleyer]

So, a tricky piece here is that this appears to be behavior of the TikTok web site. Obviously Apple makes no attempt (nor claim) to review the behavior of every web site accessible in Safari from an iPhone. And other native apps can embed WebKit-based web views into their apps.

The good news is that the scope of "malicious activity" is (at least in theory) much smaller when you constrain it to what web sites can do, as opposed to the scope of what can be done by executing ARM instructions and making syscalls.

The bad news is that the scope of "things web sites can do" keeps growing and is fingerprintable.

[emsy]

Apple has previously banned Apps for their backend content if they didn't like it. It's just that TikTok is too big and Apple is full of shit.

[lazyeye]

Apple only cares "really deeply" about ethics where there is no financial penalty attached. China would be an obvious exception to this.

https://www.theinformation.com/articles/facing-hostile-chine...

Note: This is the same as having no ethics.