(I guess that is sort of a roundabout summary...)
ToS are just what you follow if you don't want to get banned off of the site. If you don't care about that, then you can go hog wild, though you're being a bit of a jerk/not playing nice obviously.
They might be surprised that you or I looked at their TikTok video when we aren't the intended audience, but they still posted it publicly, with the understanding that it would be made freely available to others.
With how common data hacks are, why wouldn't a reasonable person expect their medical records to leak? I received at least two such breach notices just last year.
If that was not obvious to you then I apologize; though it really should have been, since you are encouraged to interact with others in good faith on HN.
And if you expect your medical records to be public...then what is the point of this discussion?
In hiQ Labs v. LinkedIn, the 9th Circuit (US) ruled that scraping publicly accessible data does not violate the CFAA's "without authorization" clause (hiQ was bulk scraping public LinkedIn profile data - in violation of LinkedIn's ToS). The Supreme Court later specifically narrowed the CFAA in Van Buren v. United States saying "exceeds authorized access" applies to accessing areas of a system you aren't entitled to enter at all, not misusing access you legitimately have (regardless of ToS violations).
Other CFAA cases have ruled similarly - being legitimately granted access (i.e. signing up for an account, or browsing publicly without logging in, since the site is intended to be available to the public) and then misusing it is not "hacking".
So in the U.S., it's not a computer crime ("hacking"/"breach") to scrape data, and nobody uses the term "data breach" to refer to scraping publicly available data on a public site, except for apparently you.
"use automated scripts to collect information from or otherwise interact with the Services" — this covers the entire scraping operation.
"make unauthorised copies, modify, adapt, translate, reverse engineer, disassemble, decompile or create any derivative works of the Services... or determine or attempt to determine any source code" — e.g. reverse-engineering the X-Argus/X-Gorgon/X-Ladon signing scheme.
"interfere with or attempt to interfere with the proper working of the Services... or bypass any measures we may use to prevent or restrict access to the Services" — TLS-fingerprint spoofing, the empty-200 soft block, and the proxy IP rotation to get around rate limiting.
"use or attempt to use another's account, service or system without authorisation from TikTok, or create a false identity on the Services" — this covers the forged device registrations (fake Android handset + carrier profiles)
"use the Services, without our express written consent, for any commercial or unauthorized purpose" — the website is monetizing the dataset and selling the code itself.
My criticism was basically - this is trying to sell an AI slop project for $699 a pop - I could get this out of a few Claude Code sessions if I had the storage and network bandwidth to run such a scraper. The value proposition is questionable when the writing shows that the entire project was AI generated, and clearly Claude understands the way the TikTok Android app internal API works quite well...
Not open-source apparently.
And I cant find the reddit post but I think I read that videos/assets are not actually pre-downloaded, they have to be requested through Tiktok API using the provided code. So if Tiktok patches, the code will need updates too.
But I think this is the 289GB data (free): https://huggingface.co/datasets/kuben-developer/tiktok-video...
Very LLMish language!
Stable Diffusion was enabled by LAION, for example. That was metadata about images and URLs to those images, but not the actual image files.
Oh, ok. Otherwise, very detailed deconstruction to scrape their API. Lots of layers of registration and creating a request that looks like it is valid client.
https://shikigami.dev - more details here