What’s Happening With The Safety of Kodi?
During the last couple of days, we have been heading a lot about how Kodi can be dangerous to use. There are some tech experts warning us against using Kodi boxes in particular - which definitely seems odd. As passionate users of Kodi, we wanted to take a look at this topic. Let's see what is happening with the safety of Kodi?
Dangers of Using Kodi: The Basics
As you surely know, Kodi is free and powerful home theater software and one of the most popular media streaming services. It's no wonder that people are installing Kodi on pretty much everything these days: Windows, Mac, Android, Amazon Fire TV and TV Stick, iOS, Chromebook, Raspberry Pi, Nvidia Shield, Xbox, Roku, Apple TV, Smart TV, Linux, and many more.
However, taking its popularity into consideration, Kodi is believed by some to be a potential threat to people's privacy and safety. This is because it has a few security and legal concerns users need to be aware of. On the other hand, anyone determined to pirate movies, TV shows, and live sports events can avoid a wide array of online threats, such as popups and malware by using Kodi addons instead of regular streaming websites. Whatever the truth, let's delve into this issue and hopefully come up with an insightful answer.
The Legality of Kodi Addons
Kodi is completely legal and open-source software, which means you can download and install it on whatever device you like. Even though completely legal, Kodi can be illegal if you are utilizing addons created by third-party developers that can be used to illegally access copyrighted content for free.
This means that users often bypass the terms and conditions they previously agreed to, wanting more than what's offered by the stock version of Kodi and thereby avoiding all forms of monetization and advertising.
In their blog post, TVAddons wrote, “Anyone who’s ever tried streaming the latest TV show online has probably experienced popups, viruses and God knows what else.”
These third-party addons often stream content from sources not sanctioned by the copyright holder. Whether these streams are legal or illegal greatly depends on your country's regulations or laws. Therefore, you have to learn how to use Kodi legally and stay away from problematic addons.
Safety of Kodi Boxes
The safety warnings are also relatable to some Kodi boxes, as these may carry potentially fatal risks. Namely, researchers carried out a number of product safety analyses on many popular Kodi-style streaming boxes. The results suggest that 100% failed to meet electrical safety standards. Therefore, you might be asking, "What's the alternative to ensure the complete safety of Kodi?" Here's what we got.
TVAddons and Legal Alternatives
As of June 2017, rumors have been swirling about the future of the TVAddons website and the Fusion repository, probably the most popular addon repository for Kodi users. In August, the website, repository, and Indigo installer went down for a few weeks but came back online with a new anti-piracy agenda.
Around the same time, some popular addons have also gone offline, including Phoenix and SALTS. The Indigo/Fusion repository housed a few addons that scraped links to pirated video streams. This resulted in a severe court fight, leaving TVAddons without its core user base and forcing the site to start from scratch.
To that end, we're recommending some 100% legal addons from the official repository, which come pre-installed on Kodi.
- Youtube
- Vimeo
- DailyMotion
- Twitch
- Trakt
- Crackler
- HDHomeRun
- LazyTV
- FunimationNOW
- Crunchyroll
- iPlayer WWW
Final Thoughts
Kodi software is not illegal, but this last year has experienced a surge in a number of people using illegal third-party add-ons and vendors selling cheap boxes that can pose serious safety risks. Despite all that, Kodi remains legal until further notice. As a result, from that standpoint, the safety of Kodi is unquestionable.
If you have had enough negative or positive activities with using Kodi and Kodi addons, feel free to share your experience in the comment section below.