What does TikTok know about you? What should you know about it?

One of the hottest TikTok trends right now seemingly is Western governments banning the immensely popular app from their employees' phones and launching probes into its data collection practices. 

This week, Canada joined the U.S. and the European Union in prohibiting the social media app on government-issued devices. Other Canadian jurisdictions and institutions are considering similar bans.

The move came just days after the federal privacy watchdog said it, along with three provinces, will investigate whether TikTok and its China-based parent company ByteDance are complying with Canadian privacy laws. 

But most TikTok users in this country aren't government employees and will continue to allow the app to access their personal data with every video they watch, like or comment on — even when they're not interacting with the app. 

While most every social media application gathers and stores user data, the amount TikTok gathers, and how transparent it is about what it collects, is what concerns some cybersecurity experts — especially because of the perception that the Chinese government could access it.

Once the app is downloaded and opened on your smartphone or tablet, it's getting to know a lot about you. 

It's voluminous terms of service lay out what you're agreeing to; access to personal data like contacts, calendars, information about which device you're using, which operating system and your location.

Like other platforms, including Facebook and YouTube, TikTok also monitors the content you engage with and for how long.

But TikTok also monitors how you use your device and how it functions, including "keystroke patterns or rhythms, battery state, audio settings and connected audio devices," according to those terms. 

It's also able to identify "the objects and scenery that appear [in your videos], the existence and location within an image of face and body features … and the text of the words spoken."

Ninety-nine per cent of people are not going to read the dozens of pages of terms of service," said Heidi Tworek, the Canada Research Chair and Director, of the Centre for the Study of Democratic Institutions at the University of British Columbia. 

Social media business rely on such analytics to sell advertising, develop new versions of programs, and tailor content to users' habits.

But Robert Potter, the co-founder and co-CEO of the Canberra-based cybersecurity firm Internet 2.0, says TikTok isn't completely transparent with its more than 1.5 billion users.

His company examined social media apps including Meta-owned Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp and found TikTok was "an outlier in the sheer amount of data it collects," he said.