Ever wonder how free apps make their money?
When you download a payment-free app from the Apple Store, the app creators have your attention AND your data, and some sell the latter on to advertisers or other data brokers. An Oxford University study found that the average app can transfer your data to 10 third-party companies, and companies can use data such as your habits, location, and the other apps on your phone, to draw a convincing profile of who you are.
With Apple unleashing its ‘nutrition label’-style Privacy Labels, Surfshark has combed through the privacy policies of over 200 apps to find out which collect the most data and which collect the least.
See any of your favorites on the list?
Key Findings
- On average, social media apps and food delivery apps collect the most data.
- Browsers and image editing apps collect the least.
- The 3 most data-hungry apps are all owned by Facebook: Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger.
- The least data-hungry apps tend to be developed specifically with privacy in mind.
- In general, the most popular apps (i.e., the ones with the most downloads) tend to collect private data across the largest number of categories.
Alternate Apps That Require Less Data
We compared privacy policies based on the 32 types of data that the Apple Store flags through their “nutrition label” initiative. Each colored square represents one type of data that each app collects. For example, Popcornflix harvests two types of Contact Info (name and email), one type of Location Info, one type of Identifier (device ID), and one type of Usage Data (product interaction).
