Meitu and the 'free' app dilemma
Before this week, Meitu (Android and iOS) was virtually unknown in the Western market. While it has been a hit in its native China for years, the app only recently made headlines in the West where it has been propelled into the top of each respective mobile app store.
In case you haven’t actually seen the app in action yet, a quick stroll around Twitter should give you all the information you need. The app can basically “beautify” any picture, mostly by turning people into anime-like caricatures of themselves. If you’ve ever wanted enlarged eyes, a narrow face, and a kawaii look, Meitu gives you the tools to virtually do so.
As is usually the case with the galore of face-altering apps in the market, Meitu has proven to be a roaring success. People are posting their Meitu-branded selfies all over their social networks. And since the app can work on any picture, there have been several misuses, including some Donald Trump stills which are too terrifying for me to show here.
Aside from its face-morphing capabilities, however, Meitu has also been a subject of discussion for a less flattering feature; that is, its extensive list of required permissions which may heavily infringe on a user’s privacy.
What many seem to note, especially on Android, is that the app requires permissions for elements that a photo-related app certainly does not need. One of the biggest offenders, for instance, is that the app has access to your IMEI, an identifier which is unique to every device.
While those who are running Android 6.0 Marshmallow and above can deny or block those permissions, and iOS is generally stricter about what it allows apps to access, the fact remains that Meitu’s permissions obviously hint at something more.
What many people fail to mention or understand is that Meitu is far from the only app to do this. There are several big and small-name apps who require a heavy list of permissions and the crushing majority of them do so for a single purpose: to collect data.
In the market of “free” apps, people seem to forget that developers also wish to make money somehow. There are several apps and services that are free for completely different reasons. Most of them, however, are provided free of charge so that they can be monetized in a different way.
To be more precise, Meitu and its ilk make their money from advertising. To accomplish their often lofty goals, advertisers tend to amass vast amounts of data. The result, as one might expect, is that these kinds of apps require a lot of permissions just so they can track your activities and deliver relevant advertising.
The controversy that has surrounded Meitu this past week is not entirely unwarranted but it would definitely be unfair to say that it is the biggest offender in the app stores. The problem is that, as a collective species, we still have no idea how to approach the concept of privacy in an increasingly online world, particularly one where advertising is so heavily involved.
Of course, when the governments of the world want to have an ever-present hand in the online activities of their citizens and mass data collection is now considered the norm rather than the exception, who can really blame advertisers?
