When almost everyone had forgotten about location-sharing apps, a French start-up came up with Zenly, a popular especially among teenagers app today, which already has more than 50 million downloads on PlayMarket. In April-June 2021, Zenly is second only to Telegram and TikTok in terms of downloads in Russia, having bypassed WhatsApp and Instagram, among others.
What is Zenly App?
Zenly is a free social app that you can use to get updates about your friends’ routine along with their current location. Zenly allows you to see the location of your friends or family members 24/7 and vice versa.
Zenly is really straightforward. When you open the app, you see a giant map with your location and your friends’ location. You can tap on a friend’s picture and see exactly where they are. Or you can just aimlessly swipe through your friends and jump around the map. This is Zenly’s core feature.
By improving the biggest downside of most location-sharing apps, the battery drain, along with making location-sharing a fun, social, and exciting experience by adding lots of interesting features, Zenly managed to make location-sharing a social network-like experience. It also reveals to friends whether users are currently at home, at work, or in school. This is automatically detected based on the user’s location history — spending overnight at the same location will inform the algorithm that that is the user’s home.
What is more, the app is full of little details that make it a polished experience. For instance, you can see the battery level of your friends. This could be useful if you’re wondering why someone isn’t answering your text messages, for instance.
This conceals the fact that the app is the one using your location. By combining your and your friends’ locations, the app can create smart social maps, showing you “hot zones” if lots of your companions are hanging out together, and notifying you if someone leaves the country or gets back into the city.
But maybe too clever?
But, using a location-based social network bears lots of issues, most of them being security-based. Back in 2014, a huge data breach compromised 4.6 million Snapchat users, when their usernames and phone numbers were stolen by hackers. Just a couple of months after, another security breach leaked at least 100,000 Snapchat photos online. Since then, Snap Inc. managed to improve its security, at least on the users’ side by adding a two-step verification process. But using the app is still a high-security risk.
And on the other hand, we have Zenly, a social network based on sharing your location with friends (and with the app). The app now faces the same risk of getting its user’s data stolen. Its smart social maps have immense value for marketers, and users should be worried because the app tracks their data.
Parents have raised concerns that letting others, especially strangers, know their real-time location puts teenagers at risk of kidnapping and sexual abuse. Zenly’s users should have lots of privacy concerns, and lots of security ones also. Zenly can track your location, but instead of making the data private, like some other location-sharing apps, it shares it with all your friends. Sure, there’s an option to make yourself “invisible” but most users don’t use the feature since they look at the app like on a social network and not a location-sharing app. Most other location-sharing apps let you share your location just with persons you select.
Sources:
https://turtler.io/news/security-risks-of-location-sharing-apps
Friends tracking app has become one of the most popular in Russia