The "Face With Tears of Joy" is the most popular emoji among English speakers in the US: Apple

Data shared by **Apple** to outline its privacy practices showed that the 😂 emoji, formally known as the ‘Face With Tears of Joy’ is the most used emoji among English language speakers in the United States. The emoji is used far more than the other most common emoji, including Red Heart, Loudly Crying Face, Face Throwing A Kiss and Smiling Face With Heart-Shaped Eyes. A surprisingly common emoji is the Skull, typically used to represent death. [caption id=“attachment_4196809” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  The Face With Tears of Joy[/caption] This is not the first time that the Face With Tears of Joy emoji has been recognised as being widely popular. In 2015, the Oxford English Dictionary picked it as the word of the year. Data from Swiftkey showed that the particular emoji comprised of 20 percent of all emoji use in the UK and 17 percent of all emoji use in the US. According to SwiftKey data for 2016 as well, the emoji was by far the most used in the UK, getting even more popular than in 2015. Apple revealed the US usage patterns in a chart without specific numbers. The document, titled “ Differential Privacy Overview” outlines the measures that Apple takes to protect the privacy of individual users, while still gathering data that can help improve the user experience. The data gathered is stripped of individual identifiers such as device IDs and IP addresses and relayed to Apple over encrypted channels. The data is then processed to compute the relevant statistics and is then shared to select Apple teams. There is limited access to even the privatised data, and is not broadly available to all employees at Apple. [caption id=“attachment_4196811” align=“alignnone” width=“825”]  Image: Apple[/caption] The whole process requires users to opt-in to send the data to Apple. The data is used to understand which websites drain data, which websites crash Safari and to come up with the QuickType and Emoji suggestions.