Our lives are increasingly being spent on our smartphones and the many services and apps that are offered on them, but as it’s still a relatively young and growing market we see change happening extremely quickly and with social media and news offering instant updates we’re now more likely than ever to be made aware of some of the news around these services – the lockdown measures and this short period of time following, however, have already led some some big changes in our favourite mobile services and apps.
The first can be found in mobile gaming, an increasing number of players have been turning to the most popular form of gaming on our mobile devices – one genre that has seen a surge in players has been within the online casino sector, but not without restrictions. There have been a recent number of changes to reduce participation options for many players deemed at risk, the primary form has been through an initiative known as gamstop which had recently been made mandatory for all operators – a number of sites have chosen to register elsewhere to get around these changes such as maximumcasinos.com but may still be impacted by other changes such as a recent ban on credit card gambling online too.
Other big news in the mobile world has been around the popular video sharing social media platform of TikTok – a recent deepdive into the code has led some users to discover some practices that have been less than desirable – some are around data protection and other tracking measures linked directly to the Chinese parent company. This has already led India to ban the app and have it removed from their marketplace, with the US and Australia also in talks to do the same, it may not be long before we see many other countries follow suit as privacy concerns are starting to move to the top of a lot of users’ priorities.
(Image from cbc.ca)
Other news is coming from Facebook which has been under criticism for quite some time, but have recently failed its first civil rights audit. This failure for many was quite expected and would’ve been surprising if they had passed the first audit, but there have been questions raised around just what standards they’re being audited against and of what has been noted as a failure and what has been missed – if some minor things have been pointed out to cause the failed audit then it may have many concerned that some more major concerns have been overlooked – Given recent privacy concerns within Facebook as a whole however, it may serve as at least some good news that some action is being taken against the platform to discover where it may stand next to its competitors, and with recent concerns being raised with what is currently happening in Hong Kong with privacy, this may be a story that remains in the public eye alongside the TikTok story for quite some time to come.
