To all the people who doubt that TikTok is Chinese government spyware.. I've got a first-hand story to tell you.
1/n

I used to work for a now-defunct company called Basho. They made a database called Riak.
Riak was used by a company called @Rovio They make a game called Angry Birds.

Angry Birds was pre-installed on a *lot* of devices and was user-installed in billions of phones.

Riak was the database that powered Angry Birds. It was a distributed database. Distributed means it can run across multiple data centres. Riak handled the replication of data between databases.

Riak did itself encrypt this data, i think it was an option, but wasn't enabled for Rovio. And the datacentre provider also didn't run encrypted links between their availability zones.

Because of this, the US govt was able to sweep up all the data that Angry Birds collected about users, including the IMEI and email address. Linking those 2 things together was pretty useful to the NSA.

This part i'm less sure about, but i do have first hand knowledge so its worth repeating. One one trip to Finland, my colleague and a senior Rovio Exec were drinking and the topic of enabling encryption came up. As i heard it from my colleague, Rovio was being paid €10m/year..

by the NSA to *not* enable encryption on the inter-datacentre traffic, because the data was so valuable.

This was confirmed by @Snowden a short while later. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/spies-use-angry-birds-and-other-apps-to-track-people-documents-show/

(I think the statute of limitations on my non-disclosure to a bankrupt startup has expired now, so i'm ok with talking about it)
So do i believe the Chinese govt is using TikTok to spy.
Hell yes. Have i uninstalled it? Also yes.