
The app that has been causing so much controversy has been finally closed down.
The Stolen app has been removed from the App Store, after many people have complained that it was endangering their privacy. This app allowed the users to steal accounts from Twitter. The accounts were turned into cards and the users were able to trade them.
After it was launched, many controversies have risen mainly because the owners of the Twitter accounts were not consulted if they wanted their accounts to be used by the app. Once a card was stolen by a user, the user was able to write anything he or she wanted on the profile of the card. In the first days after it was launched, Stolen already had 40,000 actively using it. According to Fortune, this was an effort towards creating an app as famous as Heyday, both created by Hey, Inc. The Heyday app had approximately 1 million downloads.
Many Twitter users were worried that this could lead to abuse and privacy violation so after a lot of criticism, the company decided to pull the app from the App Store. Just days after the app started to gain popularity, the company used Twitter to announce that the app will no longer be available to purchase due to the many concerns it rose. If you already bought currency with real money when you used the app, don’t worry because you will receive your money back. The app allowed you to steal more users if you had more fake money.
The controversial youtuber, Sam Pepper clearly didn’t agree with this decision, as he wrote on Twitter that the company should have just removed the edit the profile feature. This feature was extremely controversial, as users were allowed to write on other people’s profiles which could have led to people believing that the information was written by the owner of the account, not by some random person. Sam Pepper was not the only one bothered by the app closing down, as Fortune called the app addictive. Many people still enjoyed the app, especially as it allowed them to steal the accounts of their favorite celebrities as well.
The critics believe that the whole idea of the app could have easily violated their privacy, as the identities of people were stolen without their consent. Katherine Clark, a US Representative wrote letters to Jack Dorsey from Twitter and to Tim Cook from Apple, in which she expressed her concern about how the app can easily steal identities, abuse and harass people. After many complaints that this was negatively affecting a lot of people, the Stolen app has been removed from the App Store.
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