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neuronexmachina t1_j1d7w1y wrote

Reply to comment by cemyl95 in TikTok Spied On Forbes Journalists - ByteDance confirmed it used TikTok to monitor journalists’ physical location using their IP addresses by BasedSweet

I assume the goal was to narrow down the list of potential leakers, which IP addresses would be useful for. Regarding your hotel chain example, they could just perform a reverse lookup to see it's an IP belonging to a hotel chain, and weight the information accordingly along with other information they have about their employees.

Also, the article doesn't mention this, but checking the Google Play Store and Apple App Store entries for TikTok, it looks like location data is part of what the app has access to.

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tommyk1210 t1_j1h12zo wrote

It might narrow it down sure, but a public IP could belong to dozens of hotels in the same chain (if they share a central network)

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