The sources are very bad. They do not seem to understand mobile security well at all and make a lot of very strange claim. The app can not access any data which is unavailable to other app, and which American data companies are already mastered getting. It does not visibly spy on the user very much and the reports do not demonstrate differently. American data companies will always collect all data they can. Facebook, Google, Apple, Microsoft, they all collect much more than Douyin. I have seen that Google will even follow you everywhere you go and save a history.

The sources talk about using WebView for some reason (every app uses) and act like the reflection standard language feature of Java is a malicious design (the official android compiler default obfuscator uses reflection anyway). It takes an article about the data leak of an Alibaba cloud customer and made it sound like this is meaningful for Douyin or even all Alibaba cloud customer (the service is like AWS and only rent the server to the customer). Every source is full of this absurd nonsense and clearly is written to trick tech journalist. A lot of very normal things claimed to be special and a lot of incorrect information.