Tiktok - Incl. Musical.ly

Musical.ly (now TikTok) is one of the most downloaded & highest rated community apps in the world.

It's basically a video karaoke app, that lets you create all kinds of videos and share them with the community.

Before but also after their rebranding from Musical.ly to "TikTok" the company  came under scrutiny for their lack of privacy settings and failure to integrate appropriate protection settings for children especially.

Owned by Chinese firm ByteDance acquired Musical.ly in late 2017 as part of their expansion-strategy to gain traction in the US market.

This move caused a lot of concern among the original users of Musical.ly, some are welcoming the changes while others are concerned that the Karaoke features that made this app so great will now be removed for good.

Musical.ly Shutdown

Musical.ly was officially shutdown in august 2018 and it's 100MM user-base was merged into the TikTok app.

While there are many uncertainties right now, ByteDance promised to continue to develop features that center around user-experience when creating and watching videos.

Some of the features already announced include green-screen background effects as well as motion-recognition features, a.k.a filters that adapt to the users movements.

New Privacy Settings

After the afore-mentioned backlash on ByteDance regarding their apps privacy features, the company already implemented new features to improve their users safety.

New parental controls already made their way into the app, parents can now limit their teens exposure on the platform by setting all videos account-wide to private.

This has the effect that only approved followers can see the videos which is a good first step in protecting children and teens from online predators.

Parents or Guardians can also monitor the time an account has spend online and what content was being consumed.

Furthermore there are now settings that make it possible to completely delete an entire account including all of the generated content.

Private messaging was enhanced to allow users to blacklist others or receive only messages from users they are connected with.

Conclusion

At the time of writing this, there are many things left unclear, the new app itself is just as good as the old Musical.ly version has been.

it is fun to use, no question, otherwise the app wouldn't have amassed hundreds of millions of users. 

And with the recent developments and ByteDance's promise to continue focusing and improving upon the existing privacy features could lessen the concerns many had with using this app.

If you're a parent, do not let your kids use this app unattended, if you're a young user of this app please use common sense.