Consumer Reports: “Almost every website you visit collects information about what you’re doing and sends it off into the tech industry’s data analyzing machinery, where it is used for online advertising. For years, Google and Facebook (now known as Meta) have dominated that advertising business, and conducted a lot of the data gathering. But lately, a new contender has entered the scene: TikTok. A Consumer Reports investigation finds that TikTok, one of the country’s most popular apps, is partnering with a growing number of other companies to hoover up data about people as they travel across the internet. That includes people who don’t have TikTok accounts. These companies embed tiny TikTok trackers called “pixels” in their websites. Then TikTok uses the information gathered by all those pixels to help the companies target ads at potential customers, and to measure how well their ads work. To look into TikTok’s use of online tracking, CR asked the security firm Disconnect to scan about 20,000 websites for the company’s pixels. In our list, we included the 1,000 most popular websites overall, as well as some of the biggest sites with domains ending in “.org,” “.edu,” and “.gov.” We wanted to look at those sites because they often deal with sensitive subjects.  We found hundreds of organizations sharing data with TikTok….Even Planned Parenthood uses the trackers, automatically notifying TikTok about every person who goes to its website, though it doesn’t share information from the pages where you can book an appointment. (None of those groups responded to requests for comment.)…The number of TikTok trackers we saw was just a fraction of those we observed from Google and Meta. However, TikTok’s advertising business is exploding, and experts say the data collection will probably grow along with it…”