Today, noyb filed three complaints in France against Fnac (the largest electronics store in France), the real estate app SeLoger and the Under Armour subsidiary MyFitnessPal. The companies’ apps illegally access and share users’ personal data with third parties for sophisticated analytics as soon as the apps are opened. Users don’t even have the choice to consent to or prevent the sharing of their data. This approach is unlawful.
- Example complaint against Fnac (FR)
- English auto-translation of the example complaint
- Methodology and technical specifications for the network traffic capturing and analysis
Transmission by default. The complainant installed the popular apps MyFitnessPal, Fnac and SeLoger on their Android smartphone. Once opened, the applications immediately began to collect and share personal data, including Google’s unique Advertising ID (AdID), the model and brand of their device and local IP address with third parties. Such extensive data collection allows the profiling of users in order to show them personalized ads and marketing campaigns to increase the revenue for the mentioned companies.
No Consent. Under the ePrivacy Directive, the mere access or storage of data on the user’s terminal device is only allowed if users give their free, informed, specific and unambiguous consent. Two out of the three mobile apps did not display a consent banner when launching the app. The third app presented a banner that theoretically gave the complainant the choice of giving or withholding their consent. In reality, the transmission of their personal data began without any interaction on their part – and before they even had a chance to think about consent.
Ala Krinickytė, Data Protection Lawyer at noyb: “Every app needs consent to track you. Instead, they use “data collection and tracking by default”. In contrast to tracking on websites, mobile apps have seen almost no enforcement so far.”
Detailed tracking. Information such as the AdID is unique and linked to a specific person’s device. This allows advertisers and other third parties to single out users and allows them to target users in the future. Some app providers even track the user behavior outside their applications. This allows them to enrich the collected data with even more information about the user’s life.
First result of…
