Apps like Kik: 5 Best Alternatives

By Tasha Bronicka. Kik is definitely one of the most well-known apps in the sphere of Internet messaging. It covers the US mostly, but there are active users all over the world. Due to the rise of spam and fake accounts, people get distracted. If you don’t like lots of spam, we’ve some great app choices for you.
Here is the list of top 5 Kik alternatives for every taste.

 

App #1: WhatsApp

WhatsApp is a widespread messaging app all over the world. In 2014 Facebook bought WhatsApp for $19 billion. Currently, there are 900 million users. The app offers a cheap alternative to the conventional SMS service with a much wider functionality.




You can text, call, send media with just a tap of the button. WhatsApp is free to download and use. Unlike other messengers, WhatsApp has no ads. It’s the best alternative for Kik.
The user base of WhatsApp is really great, being almost equal to Facebook. So you will definitely reach all your friends and family members with only one messaging app.
Get WhatsApp Messenger right now.

 

App #2: Telegram

Telegram is a cloud-based messaging app compatible with most mobile as well desktop platforms. The app offers the ultimate level of security, speed, and privacy. Telegram uses end-to-end encryption for special secret chats that leaves no trace on the servers. Super secret chats don’t allow forwarding. Also, you can send self-destructing messages.

Moreover, secret chats aren’t parts of the Telegram cloud. You can read and send the messages in the secret chats only on the device of origin. For example, you start a secret chat on your cell phone. And when you switch to the desktop version, you don’t see the secret chat, and you can’t continue it while other chats are available in any app version.
Telegram can share large size files. You can create group chats with up to 5000 people. Telegram is an amazing app like Kik. Try Telegram for free.

 

App #3: Hike

Hike is another alternative for Kik. It’s similar to WhatsApp but with some extra features such as graphic stickers. Hike is the best app like Kik when you’re looking for more fancy while the app has lots of stickers and emoticons to share.

The app has a 100 million user base hooked to the platform. Hike sends and receives 1 billion messages a day and exchange 300+ million stickers and emoticons.
On top of that, there are lots of coupons and discount vouchers in the app. You can use them to get discounts on your favorite items. Get Hike right away.

 

App #4: Viber

 

 

Viber offers lots of features that aren’t available in the similar messengers on the market.
Similar to WhatsApp, Viber uses your phone number to create an account. You don’t need to remember long passwords and usernames.
Everyone, who has your phone number, can easily reach you via Viber. But again due to the rise of spam in the app, you might find it annoying.

Viber offers chat, special secret chats (like Telegram), media sharing, video as well as phone calls. One more thing that makes Viber a one-of-a-kind messenger, reaching out the users without Viber e.i. you can call viber out your friend who doesn’t have Viber. Of course, this isn’t free, but it costs less than your carrier may charge. Just top up your Viber account and get ViberOut credits to call everyone.
Like any other messenger, Viber has tons of stickers and emoticons to offer. The app has free as well as paid sets of stickers. With Viber stickers, you can make your conversation more joyful and fancy. Get Viber right here.

 

App #5: WeChat

 

 

WeChat is an ultimate platform for chatting and discovering new friends nearby. It lets you chat, make calls and video calls. If you want to find someone to chat with, just shake your phone, and you’ll be linked with a complete stranger. You can talk and see if you can become true friends. If the person isn’t up to you, give your smartphone another shake.

This adds more value to the app making it more engaging and fun to use. You can use hundreds of stickers with your favorite movie characters. WeChat offers media and files sharing with your friends and family. One more thing to mention, WeChat is free, and no subscriptions are required to use the app. Download WeChat right away!

If you are looking for an alternative messaging app for Kik, choose one of the messengers mentioned above or develop your own with a particular set of functions. You can download any of the apps, and we bet, you won’t miss Kik at all (maybe a little bit). Modern messaging apps offer much more than just chatting and calling. Some of them feature special photo filters to make your selfies awesome or sticker packs to add some fun to your daily conversations. Have you any alternatives to Kik, share them with us in the comments below.


Bio:
Hi, everyone! I’m Tasha. I try hard to explain geek news in a plain (and readable) language. Here you can read one of my coverage on the messenger app development. To read more, visit my blog or follow me on Facebook/Twitter

Source: http://nerdsmagazine.com/apps-like-kik-5-best-alternatives/

Google Memo Author Sues, Claiming Bias Against White Conservative Men

James Damore’s lawsuit against Google, which fired him last year after he criticized its diversity efforts, said, “Google’s open hostility for conservative thought is paired with invidious discrimination on the basis of race and gender.” Jason Henry for The New York Times

SAN FRANCISCO — James Damore was fired from his engineering job at Google last year after he wrote a memo that criticized the company’s diversity efforts and argued that the low number of women in engineering positions was a result of biological differences.

Now he is suing his former employer for workplace discrimination, claiming that Google is biased against white men with conservative views.

The lawsuit, filed Monday by Mr. Damore and another former Google employee with California Superior Court of Santa Clara County, also claims that the company uses illegal quotas in order to hire women and minorities.

The two men “were ostracized, belittled and punished for their heterodox political views, and for the added sin of their birth circumstances of being Caucasians and/or males,” Harmeet K. Dhillon from the Dhillon Law Group, the lead attorney for the plaintiffs, said in the lawsuit. “Google’s open hostility for conservative thought is paired with invidious discrimination on the basis of race and gender.”

Silicon Valley, often considered a bastion for liberal thinking, has been wrestling with how to deal with the culture wars that have reverberated throughout the country. At the same time, technology firms are trying to address the shortage of women and minorities in their ranks.

Those issues are coming to a head at Google, one of the richest and largest technology companies in the world. Google is also fighting a pay discrimination lawsuit brought by four women who worked at the company. The women claim that Google systematically pays women less than men to do the same jobs.

Mr. Damore’s memo last year argued that biological differences — citing greater levels of anxiety among women, and a lower tolerance for stress — helped explain why there were fewer women in key engineering positions and leadership roles at Google. His writing sparked outrage at the company and across Silicon Valley for rationalizing the pay and opportunity gap at technology companies.

Mr. Damore’s dismissal became a rallying point for conservatives who saw technology companies as workplaces dominated by groupthink. Ms. Dhillon, the lawyer who brought the suit, is a committeewoman for California in the Republican National Committee.

Google did not provide immediate comment about the lawsuit. Sundar Pichai, the company’s chief executive, said in the past that Mr. Damore’s memo had violated the company’s code of conduct because it advanced “harmful gender stereotypes in our workplace.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/08/technology/google-memo-discrimination-lawsuit.html

Hundreds of Smartphone Apps Are Spying on Your TV Watching. Here’s How to Disable Them

If you’re afraid that your smartphone is spying on you…well, you’re right. But that’s kind of a non-optional part of modern living: amassing huge amounts of consumer data is how companies like Google operate. But recently some third-party apps have been found taking a few more liberties than they should, like a HAL 9000 in your pocket.


The New York Times reported in late December that hundreds of Android apps have been found snooping on their users with the built-in microphones on smartphones. Specifically, these apps are listening for TV show broadcasts, commercials, and even movies you watch in the theater, amassing information on what kind of things you like to watch. The third-party software, from a company called Alphonso, has been embedded in many Android apps available for free on the Play Store. Some of the apps are also available on the iPhone, and their App Store entries claim to use the same technology and snooping habits.
Why Listen to TV Broadcasts?


Alphonso’s software uses the same technology that Shazam and similar services employ to automatically detect the song you’re listening to. It samples small bits of audio, creating a digital “fingerprint” of it, and comparing it against a a database on their server to identify the show or movie. In fact, Alphonso’s CEO says they have a deal with Shazam, and use their specific technology to do this. But this embedded software can even be listening even when your phone’s screen is turned off and it’s ostensibly idle.





Amazon’s system-generated links at the bottom of each page are a fairly benign form of targeted, profile-based advertising.

Why? It’s all about the advertising. Marketing firms know that people who watch certain TV shows are more likely to buy certain products. For example, if you’re binge-watching the latest Marvel Comics show on Netflix, it’s reasonable to assume you’d click on an ad for an Avengers Blu-ray sale the next time you’re browsing Amazon. If you watch Hawaii Five-0 on CBS, you might be a little more interested in a cruise line package vacation than, say, airfare to New York City. If you watch NBC Nightly News, you might be more likely to want a subscription to the Wall Street Journal.


These minor connections and thousands more like them build up a profile of you as a consumer, connected to your digital identities on Google, Amazon, Apple, Windows, Facebook, Twitter, and more or less every major mobile and web hub out there. It’s not exactly insidious—you’re not being forced to do anything you don’t want to—but every piece of data and every connection made in these profiles serves a single purpose. That purpose is to make you more likely to buy stuff, and that makes the data collected incredibly valuable.




Based on my user data and tracking cookies, advertisers target me on Facebook with relevant ads I’m more likely to click on.

Hence the somewhat sneaky methods companies like Alphonso are reaching for to get even more data about your life and your desires. The more data they collect, the more complete the picture they can form of you as a consumer, and the more advertisers will pay them. It’s not illegal, and some of them are toeing some very thin lines to keep it that way. Alphonso claims it never records the voice data of human speech from people, only the audio coming from TVs and other electronic devices. But there’s no denying that the idea of your phone listening to what’s going on around you is creepy, especially if you haven’t specifically asked it to do so.


Ironically, Facebook has been repeatedly accused of this same snooping behavior, despite zero evidence that it was actually going on. Security researchers still haven’t found any evidence that the Facebook app activates your phone’s microphones without telling you…but it’s entirely possible that Facebook’s advertising partners are using data collected by other apps that use Alphonso and other data collection companies to serve you relevant ads.
How Do They Listen In?


You let them. No, seriously: these apps have to ask your permission to listen to you. But they’re not entirely honest about when they’re listening, what they’re listening to, why they’re listening at all, and what they do with the data they collect.


Let’s have a practical demonstration. I’ve downloaded one of the applications identified in the New York Times article on my Android phone. It’s a free-to-play darts game known as Darts Ultimate. After running the app for the first time, it asks for permission to access your location and microphone. This one actually explicitly tells you it’s listening to your TV as well.




Think about it: what possible need could a simple game about darts need to have access to your phone’s location? Why would it need to listen to the microphone for anything? It doesn’t: this is information it passes along to marketing and advertising firms. And now, through the Android permissions system and a single pop-up—those things that the vast majority of users will simply tap “OK” on without thinking—it has your permission to do so.


What the app isn’t telling you is that it’s using software embedded in the game and APIs in Android’s operating system to listen in to television and streaming broadcasts even when the phone isn’t on. In addition to being unsettling, the app’s developer is making money off of you and your phone without you even playing the game, not to mention using your phone’s processing power and battery on things you’d probably prefer it wasn’t.
How Can You Stop Them?


The easiest way to stop these apps from snooping in on your TV binging is simply to uninstall them, or never install them in the first place. Keeping a ton of unnecessary apps on your phone, especially from the kind of unscrupulous developers who’d take a kickback for putting extra advertising software in their ad, is a good way to kill its performance.





The next best thing is to keep an eye on those permissions as you use apps. In Android 6.0 and above, an app has to manually request permission from the user to access hardware like the microphone, and ask it at the first point of use. iOS now works the same way. Simply tap “Don’t Allow” in the permission pop-up for anything that you don’t think the app really needs to use. This is a good general policy, in fact, and games and other simple apps shouldn’t be asking for these permissions in the first place. Here are few of the more risky ones to look out for:


Microphone
Phone
SMS
Location
Contacts
Camera
Cellular Data


Some apps might have a legitimate use for a permission that isn’t immediately obvious. For example, plenty of apps request access to the Phone permission just so they can save or pause if you get an incoming call. But there’s rarely reason for a simple game to need access to your SMS texting capability. Some apps might cease working altogether if one or more permissions are denied—for example, Pokemon GO can’t work without knowing your location. You’ll have to decide for yourself how much access is appropriate based on the app.


If you want to remove permission from any apps, here’s how to do it.
On Android


If you have an Android device, go to the main Settings menu, then tap Apps. Tap the specific app you want to adjust.




Tap “Permissions.” This will show you a list of permissions that the app has requested, and which ones are currently enabled. Simply tap the slider on the right side of the screen to enable or disable permissions individually.





For more details about handling Android app permissions, check out this guide.
On the iPhone and iPad

On iOS, the Settings menu allows access to a master list of which apps have access to specific permissions (called “Access” in the interface). These are broken up into different sections, though. In the main Settings menu, tap “Privacy.” Each of the sub-sections in this screen will list all of the apps using their respective permissions, allowing you to selectively disable them one by one.

If you’re more concerned about a single app, go back to the main Settings menu and scroll down until the app appears in the list. Tap it and you’ll see all the permissions it’s requested and been granted under “Allow [app] To Access.” You can tap each individual permission to enable or disable it.

You can read up on managing permission access in iOS here.

Again, the best way to retain your privacy from apps like this is to not use them in the first place. Pay attention to every popup you see, think about why an app may be requesting the permissions it does, and if anything seems fishy, look it up on the app’s store page or website—or ignore it entirely.

Source: https://www.howtogeek.com/338409/hundreds-of-smartphone-apps-are-spying-on-your-tv-watching.-heres-how-to-disable-them/