Show HN: Authenticate TikTok Users Without Login Kit (Via Profile Bio)

1 point

a year ago

The official way to authenticate TikTok users in your app is through TikTok’s Login Kit [1]. But integrating it requires passing a manual review [2] - and many apps get rejected if they don’t meet TikTok’s criteria.

I recently discovered a simple alternative: you can verify ownership of a TikTok account without any official API.

---How it works---

TikTok publicly exposes basic profile data through their website. For example:

curl https://www.tiktok.com/@example (@example can be the username of any public TikTok profile)

This fetches the profile page (HTML), which includes up-to-date bio information. There no rate limits (even from VPNs or AWS IP range), and profile bio updates are reflected within < 30 seconds.

This makes it possible to verify that a user controls a given TikTok account by:

1. Generating a unique code e.g., a 4-emoji sequence from e.g. 100 different emojis (allowing over 100m combinations).

2. Asking the user to add this sequence to their TikTok bio.

3. Fetching their bio to check for the sequence => if included in bio => user is owner of the account.

---Proof of Concept: CrushTok---

To show this in action, I built CrushTok - a „dating app“ based on TikTok profiles.

(Pitch: CrushTok lets you create fun surveys for your TikTok Story, where your followers can secretly share if they have a crush on you. If two people admit a mutual crush, they’ll see a match!)

If you got TikTok installed on your mobile you can try CrushTok and the „bio verification“ out with the link in the bio here: https://www.tiktok.com/@crushtok90

[1] https://developers.tiktok.com/doc/login-kit-web/ [2] https://developers.tiktok.com/doc/getting-started-create-an-...