Changes come to our mobile apps and sites extremely often as many are still figuring out the best ways to operate in this changing market – we’ve recently seen this ring true for mobile gaming as changes to gambling initiatives have had a big impact on many services – the biggest change had been to the Gamstop scheme which is aimed at reducing participation options for problem players, but as many look for ways around the initiative they have turned to sites such as Maximum Casinos which have a list of sites that don’t fall under these restrictions – but the latest news has been around one of the biggest social media apps in the world.
The giant video sharing app, TikTok, has recently come under some criticism after a Reddit user did a deep dive into the apps code and found that it has been tracking a lot of user data that it perhaps shouldn’t have been doing – the user found that the app had been recording hardware information such as the phone model and hardware ID, as well as networking information such as IP and WiFi information. Perhaps a little more sinister is that if a user had posted any geo-tagged video, then the app would constantly ping the device location every thirty seconds or so giving constant updates on where the device was – given recent privacy and security concerns, this has led to many considering banning the Chinese backed app entirely.
The first to do so has been India, as it’s now nearly 500 million strong users are unable to access the application after it had been removed from the app marketplaces in the region, but more recently has been the US and Australia both speaking out about considering doing the same. The US has already mandated that the app cannot be installed on any governmentally issued devices around security concerns a few months ago, but this finding suggests they may extend the same restrictions to the public too. With recent law changes in Hong Kong courtesy of the Chinese government, it seems countries around the world are being more concerned with the Chinese backed apps – if these findings are substantiated and found to be true, it could cause a wide span of changes in application and social media management as a whole.
Given how much time users spend on social media apps per day and how many users are registered, they’re easily the most used applications on modern smartphones – given this discovery it’s likely that some will take a look into how other social media apps are operating and whether or not they do any similar tracking, it has long been known that many do track user data quite a lot – if TikTok is banned in many of the countries that are suggesting doing it, it could spur the change for many other forced changes in social media apps or find similar efforts taken to reduce user exposure to them as much as possible.