Apps With the Most Hook, are They Good to Use on Mobile?

Today we have many apps on our mobile devices, but do we know what these applications do? All the permissions they use? o What information do they have access to within the devices? 

Many of us ask ourselves these same questions, and this concern is accentuated if we think about the apps that our sons and daughters have on their devices and use every day. For this reason, we will solve all these questions in this article.

What Are The Most Used Apps By Minors?

In the first place, we will see which applications minors use the most in their day today. In this sense, we see how social network applications are the most used applications, where three applications stand out above the rest:

Instagram: The photo application is the favorite app for minors to be able to share their photos with their friends and followers.

TikTok: This short video application is another favorite among minors, to such an extent that it is the app that is growing the most among this audience.

Snapchat: This app for sending videos that are destroyed had its peak a few years ago among teenagers and university students; although it was a temporary increase, it remained among minors.

In addition to social networks, the YouTube application is another application that minors use the most since they entertain themselves with it by watching videos from their favorite channels. In this sense, the Twitch application is another application used the most by minors, with an incredible increase in the months of the pandemic, where its use has gone from being sporadic to practically habitual.

Once we have known which applications are the ones that minors use the most, we go to the reason why we have made this article, see what dangers these applications can cause and how we can avoid them:

TikTok: As we have seen, TikTok is one of the most used applications by our children, but as happens with other social networks, they also have dangers linked to the use of this application without parental control. As we talked about in our blog about TikTok parental control, this app has the following risks:

It is highly addictive since it makes our children use the app every day, leaving aside other tasks such as studying.

It creates in the minor an obsession to obtain social approval, which is due to the need it makes in minors to get support from strangers.

Exposure of your private life exposes personal information to strangers, such as your home, school, or places you usually go.

Lastly, on the TikTok social network, many adult sexual predators are looking for minors.

These dangers are very worrying for minors, but fortunately, this app developed a parental control system to control the video content that our children can see; you can see an article about TikTok parental control on our blog.

Instagram: The Instagram application is another of the applications that minors use every day, which is not without dangers for children. The significant risks of this social network are the following:

The overexposure that minors make of their private life, where a stranger can obtain information about their entire life simply by looking at their account.

Addiction to the use of this social network is, unfortunately, the order of the day since the use that minors make every day is possible that it can become excessive.

Grooming and Cyberbullying are linked to the first point that we have commented on in this article since the overexposure to their private life causes many the minors to have a lot of problems since they can receive bullying messages from strangers or even from acquaintances who have access to their account, as well as statements from adults deceiving minors.

Lastly, this application can also cause a socialization problem since, in many cases, they base their lives on the use of these social networks, which can cause them to lose skills to socialize in real life.

All these dangers have a way to be avoided, and the simplest is education by the parents of minors who teach the correct use of this social network, learning to identify who they can get in touch with and who they can’t or from what way they can make healthy use of this app.

YouTube: This social network was a pioneer in its field; it was born in 2005 by three former PayPal employees, they wanted a place where they could share their videos, and that’s where the idea came from. In 2006, the giant Google bought it because it saw its potential.

Young people watch videos, share videos, and fully engage in a way that they never could when they watch TV. On the other hand, it is a very attractive and easy to consume channel, those who upload videos are called “Youtubers.”

YouTube is no longer just a fun entertainment tool; and it’s a powerful professional tool that you can’t ignore.

But…what dangers does YouTube have?

The most significant danger is that you can upload videos of almost anything; violence, hate speech, religious themes, sexual content.

Minors are exposed to all kinds of content that are not suitable for them; this is where parents’ reasonable parental control and supervision would come in.

Securekids, together with the control that YouTube already has, is the perfect complement to protect our sons and daughters a little more.

As we always say in most of our articles, the best tool for good use of technology is knowledge, dialogue with minors, and supervision.

We hope we have cleared up some doubts and how to deal with technology at home.