UPDATE: In the comment section, Socialcam has stated that the pushed a “fix” for this. Because I’ve uninstalled the app and refuse to install it again, I can’t confirm that this is true, but I thought it important to point out.
Socialcam’s Shady Secret: I had a hunch that Socialcam was doing some really shady tactics to get more of a bump in engagement at the detriment of user experience. Looks like my hunch was right.
The app has been on quite the tear lately with how much it’s growing and getting insane engagement. It’s already been reported that they’ve been ingesting YouTube videos to get a further increase, but I found something even shadier. Turns out they don’t respect the user’s wishes to not broadcast what videos I watch to their Facebook feeds.
Every time someone watches a video on Socialcam it automatically publishes a story to their Facebook feed about the activity. Inside the app there’s a toggle to turn it off, but it turns out that’s not quite true. If you leave the app and come back, they turn it on again. To make matters worse, after a few seconds they replace the toggle with the Socialcam logo hiding the option to turn it off entirely.
Sure this might have given them a much higher level of engagement by the simple nature of publishing more activity to Facebook, but at what cost? They’re misleading their users in a giant way and should answer for this. I for one am deleting the app, but I’m only one of millions unfortunately.
