The applications that collect the most data have been revealed: Which social media companies follow you the most?

According to a study by the cybersecurity firm Internet 2.0, TikTok collects more data than any other social media app or messaging service. The popular video sharing application, owned by the China-based company ByteDance, has approximately one billion active users worldwide. However, its source code has more than twice the industry average viewership. TikTok's tracking software secretly collects data about users. It may collect information about your Wi-Fi network and SIM card, and how this data is used is unknown.

TikTok is not alone, with Microsoft Teams, Outlook, Instagram, Twitter and Snapchat in the top eight among the 22 largest companies that collect the most data. Facebook ranks 16th in Internet 2.0's research.

TIKTOK, VK, MICROSOFT TEAMS APPS COLLECT THE MOST DATA

Using Malcore software, Internet 2.0 scored each app based on the amount of personal information collected. TikTok scored a total of 63.1 points, which is a higher score (VK 62.7) than the popular Russian social network VK, which is similar to Facebook and banned by Apple. It turned out that TikTok has 9 trackers and VK has 13 trackers.

The third most data-collecting application was Viber Messenger, which has more than one billion users, and it was learned that it contains 11 trackers.

Microsoft Teams, which is popular for business video conferencing, had four trackers, but offered a high amount of permission requests and thus placed fourth with a score of 38.

Estimated to have 400 million users worldwide, the Outlook email service scored 35.9 with seven trackers, placing it in fifth place. The average scores of the applications that collect the most data in the digital platform sector were 28.8, followed by Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat and LinkedIn, which all scored around 34 points.