A topic of hot discussion over the past year or two has been around growing concerns with the different app marketplaces, but particularly bought to light toward the end of 2020 when the popular game developer of Epic most known for their title of Fortnite made a change to their game on mobile in order to work around the 30% tariff often charged by the big marketplaces – there had been suggestions that the ongoing legal battle could lead to major changes and allow services that use jackpotjoy promo codes amongst many others to find representation where they may have otherwise not been able to – but the goalposts have somewhat shifted since as growing changes to privacy and user data seem very much on the way.
The biggest change has come from Apples own App Store, as a surprise to many, as the new privacy feature has aimed to give users much more transparency around exactly what data is being requested with the first big name to run into trouble being the popular messaging platform of WhatsApp being delivered by Facebook to have privacy concerns come into question. Initially, following the changes that brought more security to users who had declined to accept the permissions required by the app, certain features would be disabled although this has since seemingly been changed – and the privacy changes could just be the start of many to come too as it appears Apple are firmly focussed on delivering more transparency to users.
It does raise the question, however, of whether or not this practice will be extended across other platforms too, whilst the Play Store will be the obvious target to see if Google will match the efforts put forward by Apple there are other independent app stores that may not make the change – ultimately the change is quite a big deal and others following does signal a huge change into user data protection and privacy which in many regards had been exploited for quite some time.
Big names like Facebook have already protested the change but given they do stand to lose out a lot by the change it’s no surprise – given the prevalence of ads within most apps and the way certain methods are used to ‘trick’ users into accepting certain terms that may not be of their own benefit it certainly will be a positive change for most. Given the change is still so new, the full impact is yet to be seen, but if the early signs are anything to go by then this initial change could be the first of many acting in favour of protecting the user and working against the big apps that have taken advantage of privilege and the lack of user knowledge since their inception.
