There were inquiries in our forum whether we could integrate Tapatalk because it was so nicely comfortable. Apart from the fact that the Xenforo software we licensed has also been optimized for mobile use from home, such proprietary solutions have actually become superfluous in times of responsive design and data protection and in the case of Tapatalk probably even counterproductive and harmful to data protection, website performance and usability in general.
We consulted internally and certainly did not make the decision easy. However, the experience of others with Tapatalk shows that this provider seems to have some corpses in the basement and has also shown non-transparent business practices in dealing with the forum operators. In concrete terms, one can only refer to the colleagues of Computerbase, who have justified precisely these circumstances more than superficially.
Newer versions of Tapatalk are said to be GDPR compliant (at least it promises their new privacy policy, but personal research hasnot been able to reveal any truly transparent explanations. And that the provider is now so suddenly fundamentally changed his previous behavior remains to be proven.
After studying the User Agreement and the privacy policy linked above, we have concluded that implementation should be rejected. I would also like to justify this view:
- Personalized Advertising – Even if Tapatalk pretends to be able to turn off this option, it can't really prove it. Tapatalk is mainly financed by placing advertisements and passing on personal information to third parties, which we generally reject. Why, on the one hand, should we try to run our Internet content, including the forum, with only selected and tolerable advertising, when, on the other hand, we lose all control over what our registered users are offered in advertising?
- Traffic – Tapatalk generates its own traffic at our expense and cost. This means that users who are lost to our website are constantly being deducted. In addition, the rather in-depth integration of the plugin into Xenforo also represents a high technical risk that on the one hand our data is intercepted and on the other hand the Tapatalk servers are constantly contacted in order to transmit this data. Apart from the high risk factor, as we cannot be sure that Tapatalk is really not vulnerable.
- Privacy – I already wrote that the careless integration of such an advertising provider (because Tapatalk is nothing else in the end), which can access browser and web data as well as our forum database, is a data protection risk Represents. At the latest the input of the access data must be rejected in any case and the plugin also needs more rights and accesses, which we are willing to grant such an add-on even to a limited extent.
It is and remains as it is. The responsive design of the forum is easy to use, subscribing to topics is just as good. The little flash at the top lists the latest contributions and answers, you don't really need more.
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