Social media giants are tracking your every move, scooping up huge amounts of personal data from armies of unwitting users - but some are guilty of hoovering up more information than others. TikTok is the biggest data harvester, collecting more than any other social media app or messaging service, according to a study by cyber security firm Internet 2.0. Owned by Chinese firm ByteDance, the popular video-sharing app has around a billion active users worldwide. But it has more than double the number of trackers in its source code than the industry average. TikTok's tracking software surreptitiously gathers data about users to fine tune the algorithm running its main feed.

Looking back, 2017 was a significant year for technology. Consider that at the beginning of 2017, Bitcoin was virtually unknown to most people, and Artificial Intelligence was something that they had perhaps heard of once or twice, but was still a concept confined to science fiction. Cloud computing was still untested to many people, and hardly anyone would realise how prevalent Bots would become a mere 12 months later. As you can see, if we have a similarly fruitful "rollercoaster" in 2018, we shall certainly be living in a more interesting world at the end of it! Previously on my blog, I used to make a few predictions at the beginning of every year, trying to figure out what the tech world would do over the next 12 months. It was more light hearted than anything else, and it's always funny to go back and see how wrong you were. On occasion though, I did manage to get a few right……So lets try and do the same for 2018.