Tick tock! Or rather, TikTok! Described as “a short-form video hosting service owned by the Chinese company ByteDance”, it’s yet another app I don‘t have on my phone and I don’t really feel the need to add it. From some of the samples played on the news this lunchtime I’m even more convinced that I don’t need it. Does anyone really need or want to see short videos of someone’s cat and dog having a fight? Have they really nothing more interesting going on in their lives? And that applies to both the maker of the video and those who watch it.
It’s in the news because TikTok is the latest thing to come under fire for being Chinese owned. There is a great fear, apparently, that the Chinese government is trawling through all the TikTok posts to find interesting information about other countries so that they can take over the world. Do they have someone, a whole team of people and computers, looking put for compromising stuff popping up?
TikTok is almost certainly about to be banned in the USA and here in the UK there’s talk of not allowing government employees to have the app on their phones. That’s both their work phones and their personal phones, because it seems it’s quite common for MPs and other government employees to answer and send messages during meetings. Now, I know they need to be contactable pretty much 24/7 but I would have thought that the first rule of meetings should be to switch phones off. Goodness, I think the principal of the college where I worked would have been spitting feathers if we had all been messing with our phones during staff meetings. You are asked to switch them off or at least put hem on silent in the cinema and theatre. And in chess tournaments all the players have to hand in their phones before entering the playing room - no cheating allowed.
This is the strange modern world we live in. You look something up on the internet and suddenly you are inundated with advertisements for related products. In fact sometimes it seems that all you need to do is discuss something in the presence of your phone and even that generates a mass of advertising. So to some extent I can understand the worries about phone apps. They are able to glean all sorts of background information about the user. And MPs who want to be up to the minute, modern, down there with the kids use all the latest apps.
Life used to be a lot simpler!
I have just been downloading templates for dinosaurs for a craft project we have in mind. I wonder what sort of advertising will arise from that!
Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!
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