Privacy labels on the iPhone app are a real eye-opener to show how much of our personal data is accessed by certain apps. If you’ve ever wondered which apps collect and share the most data, cloud storage company pCloud has done the legwork.
The company researched app privacy labels in the App Store and compiled a ranking of apps according to the percentage of personal data collected, as well as the amount of it transferred to third parties …
You can probably guess the two worst offenders:
80% of apps use your data to market their own products in the app and beyond. This includes things like apps offering your own ads on other platforms, as well as in-app promotions for their own benefit, or for third parties paying for the service. We revealed which apps collect the most data for this by analyzing how many of the possible 14 data categories each collect under Apple’s Advertising or Marketing’s section. […]
The top two here are Instagram and Facebook. Both are owned by Facebook and use 86% of your data to sell you more of their own products and to offer you relevant ads on behalf of others. In second place are Klarna and Grubhub, which use 64%, while Uber and its food app, Uber Eats, both use 57%.
The data that these apps use may vary from your date of birth to offer you exclusive discounts to the times you normally use the app. For example, if Uber Eats knows that you regularly browse at 6pm on a Friday, they will know when to hit the ads.
More than half of all audited apps shared at least some data with third parties, and the same two apps again topped the list: Instagram shared 79% of the personal data it collected, while Facebook shared it with 57 % of the data did.
Programs collect your data for many reasons. One of the initial reasons for this is to make your experience better, track how you communicate with them to fix bugs and improve how it works. However, they also use your information to target you with ads on any platform. We’ve seen it all – we’re done searching on one app and then an ad appears selling us something we just looked at, somewhere else.
This is done by passing on your data to third parties, something that our study shows that more than half of all programs do. Third parties may be associated with the company that runs the app, or they may just pay a fee to access their users’ data.
Social listening companies are often where your data ends up. Companies like BuzzSumo and Hootsuite collect your data to enable people to analyze, understand and ultimately sell you […]
Instagram shares a staggering 79% of your data with other companies. Including everything from purchasing information, personal data and browser history. No wonder there is so much promotional content in your feed. With over 1 billion monthly active users, it is worrying that Instagram is a hub for sharing such a large amount of data from its ignorant users. In second place is Facebook, which gives away 57% of your data.
pCloud also identified apps that collected and shared the least amount of personal data, including 14 who did not have access at all.
You can see the full privacy rating of the iPhone app in the company’s blog post.
Photo: Szabo Viktor / Unsplash
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