Many will look back fondly at memories of the popular short video streaming site Vine and the many laughs that it has brought with endless compilations that are now scattered across Youtube – but also left many feeling that we wouldn’t see a suitable replacement in the same form.
Some had tried, with musical.ly being perhaps the biggest success following just aimed in a different way, but would eventually lead to the merger with perhaps now one of the biggest social media platforms in the world – TikTok.
Following much in the same blueprint, users can upload short videos around any topic they like and share them on the platform, with similar options of collaborating with other content creators on the platform and many of the same tools available, it’s no surprise that it took off in the way that it did – but it had received its fair share of criticism too. The merger with musical.ly meant the platform had been filled with a much younger audience, and given a lot of the content that had been appearing on TikTok especially early was very suggestive and a little questionable it led many to actively boycott the service, but despite this the numbers continued to grow – but the most recent controversy may be difficult to recover from.
It had recently been discovered that there was some shady things going on in the backend of TikTok, with it being declared as nothing more than intrusive malware at best. News had came out that it had been tracking a lot of data that it shouldn’t have as well as collecting other information that it has no reason having access to – the app has already been banned from India and all of its marketplaces as well as other large countries such as the US and Australia taking a look at the app and considering banning it under fears that it may be being used as a Chinese spyware app – whether or not this will all move ahead is yet to be seen, but changes are happening extremely fast.
Recent news around TikTok isn’t the only change in tech that we’re seeing recently either, mobile gaming may be taking a big hit too following the successes during the lockdown measures – as online gambling has found an increase during this period of time, changes to different initiatives and schemes, most notably Gamstop, had been recently made mandatory for all operators or be at risk of losing their gaming license, despite this a number of operators have registered elsewhere to allow these casinos to be available to these players without restriction.
With increasing concerns around privacy and security online, there’s a huge focus on making sure that many of our apps are safe to use and fit for purpose, many big tech giants have already spoken out around current events regarding data protection and privacy and it seems to be in the public eye now, it’s an interesting development and a lot seems to be changing extremely quickly.
