Been in use in China for years, the beautifying, make-over with anime looks, Meitu – a Chinese app was recently launched internationally for Android and iOS devices. The app with its heavily editing and picture molding capability along side very common photo filters just gone viral among selfie lovers around the world.
If you have seen anything like those Chinese or Japanese anime faces of your friends and family members through your Facebook or Instagram timeline, and wondered how they are doing this thing at all? well this is the app you were looking for.
The app’s functionality is similar to most of the apps you might have used for photo filtering and sharing. You can choose an already taken picture from the gallery and edit with Meitu – or you can also use Meitu camera viewfinder to take new photo to proceed. The app then makes you up with special treatment automatically (via ” Hand Drawn” filter) bringing stunning anime looks on your face and in the background – really impressive for kids specially, for grown ups as well.
What results out is the likes of pictures in the below screen taken from Instagram explore. It’s just fun for kids but also the grown ups sometimes want that.
What’s the concern then?
Going viral, sure could be the blessing for some apps or videos or anything on the internet today but, some times it could be as worse as you wouldn’t had wanted. The more you grow, the more easily you can been observed. Hence people with more care and consciousness want to dig into your thing how are you handling their privacy and security with their stuff.
That’s what just happened with Meitu
As quickly, the Meitu app went viral, it also caught the concerns of the privacy experts. And they found some kind of unnatural behavior of the app requesting your permissions as much as not needed for the app to work which more importantly includes the phone status and information. Digging into the code of the app, it was also found that the information collected from the phone was being sent to the servers in China – well of course back to the developers. That include the information such as MAC address or IMEI.
Where some found it really alarming, some also tried to explain that it’s getting over treatment for what the Chinese app is doing as it not really uncommon with the apps people usually use. One can easily go into settings and see what permissions are they allowing the app to collect from data or information from their phone. Although the concerns are not applied to iOS version of the app as App Store doesn’t allow to publish the app with these requirements, it’s all about Android giving the app a nightmare for something every other app might be collecting from your phone and you don’t know.
In fact, since Android 6 Marshmallow, you literally allow or disallow the permission when the app tries to use an individual feature of the phone. It tells you actually knows when you allow the app take something from the phone. But sure phone information such as IMEI are not important at all for an app like Meitu would need to work then why would they need such information at first place? Well the app indeed works if you don’t allow phone information.
Meitu came up with official statement focusing on the fact that it doesn’t sell user data “Meitu DOES NOT sell user data in any form.” and what and why these data and information collected.
“As Meitu is headquartered in China, many of the services provided by app stores for tracking are blocked. To get around this, Meitu employs a combination of third-party and in-house data tracking systems to make sure the user data tracked is consistent. Furthermore, the data collected is sent securely, using multilayer encryption to servers equipped with advanced firewall and IDS, IPS protection to block external attacks”
The Real Thing!
Most (in fact almost all) of the apps on your phone collect data with tracking code that sends the information back to the developer at some sort of databases and servers – it’s called analytics and it’s there for years. The experts raised questions about collecting information such as IMEI, but as if you look closely not only this Meitu app is doing this, the far more issue for those American experts is that the app is sending this information to the servers in China – having concerns if the Chinese Govt. might be looking into their privacy.
It’s all over the internet with different opinions I just have put mine above. You can search with “Meitu Privacy” on Google to if you are interest. I’ll close it up here with the fact, if you are not as conscious about it, you can head over and download the app from Google Play store or App Store respectively for Android or iOS devices.
