“Even VPNs don’t lead to circumvention” in India, Gosain told WIRED.
In the early hours of the US ban, it was unclear exactly how feasible it would be to circumvent the restrictions for US accounts. TikTok appeared to have taken a more extreme approach and blacked out any US versions of the app — obscuring versions of the TikTok app software that were made to be downloaded and used by US users. It also seemed to block US linked accounts regardless of IP address or SIM country information.
Running a VPN alone was certainly not enough to bypass the ban and get back on TikTok. But apparently using a non-US TikTok account after removing a SIM (or on a device without a US SIM card/US phone number) worked when combined with a VPN. Similarly, using a VPN with a desktop browser or the Tor browser was enough to cause a non-US TikTok account to load early Sunday morning in the US, although TikTok’s desktop version has always been much more limited than its mobile application.
The impact of the ban was immediate, with internet traffic data from monitoring firm Kentik showing an immediate and dramatic drop in connections to TikTok. On other social media platforms, people are complaining that TikTok is not working on their US-connected devices or accounts, even though they are abroad.
TikTok’s privacy policies, which are not unlike those of other social media apps, describe a range of information it collects that can be used to identify people’s home locations. This includes everything from address information provided by users to device system settings, SIM card regions and other network information. (TikTok’s privacy policy now includes a note saying that service to US users may not be available due to the law, calling it an “outage”.)
In a statement posted online, Apple said if US users delete TikTok or move to a new phone, TikTok and other ByteDance apps cannot be reinstalled. It also said the ban on software distribution would affect people visiting the US. “Users visiting from outside the United States with their Apple Account set to a non-United States country or region cannot download, update, or make in-app purchases and new subscriptions,” Apple says.
“TikTok inspects the source IP of the network packets – if the source IP belongs to India, it drops the packets,” explains Gosain of the restrictions in India. “The TikTok app also fetches the country information embedded in the SIM card, and if the country code is ‘IN’, it filters the network connection. When we remove the SIM card, the TikTok app fails to identify Indian users from the SIM card, and when we use VPNs, the IP address changes, and it no longer belongs to the Indian IP range not. Thus, TikTok fails to identify that the user is accessing from India. This is how we bypass the filtering.”
Virtual private networks, or VPNs, work by routing your internet traffic through servers physically maintained in locations around the world, allowing you to choose an IP address connected to a different location than where you physically are. For example, US TikTok users can use VPNs to make it appear as if they are accessing the internet from outside the US. VPNs also stop your Internet Service Providers (ISPs) from seeing your browsing data, adding an extra potential layer of privacy. When you use a VPN, your ISP will simply see connections to the VPN instead of having access to the detailed list of all the websites you visit.