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All apps are not created equal, especially when it comes to social media apps. To some degree, you can say that any app that you use often depletes your battery faster, but when it comes to figuring out which apps are doing a number on your data and could be compromising your privacy, that takes a few more investigative skills to figure out. If you’re concerned about your identity, this is the one app you should delete right away, according to privacy experts. And, as a bonus, we included another app that is probably NOT on your radar but could be compromising your security, as well.
Facebook App
Surprise, surprise! (or maybe you expected this one). The Facebook app is at the top of most tech experts’ lists of apps to get rid of if your aim is to beef up your security.
“Facebook is one such popular app that shares your data,” says Katherine Brown, a tech and privacy expert at Spyic. “That includes information such as your name, location, email, and IP address. The app also shares your phone number, network provider, and accelerometer data. Recipients of the data are marketers to deliver personalized ads to consumers based on their likes and commonly visited sites. Sharing your data exposes clients to exploitation by fraudsters and breaches their privacy. Currently, iPhone users can go to settings to stop cross-site tracking. However, when the iPhone updates its operating system, applications will first seek users' permission before tracking their data.”
There’s another app that some experts say is a silent contributor to data woes — one you might never guess.
“Even though Social media apps are the biggest culprits of data sharing, they've become so commonplace that the practice has pretty much been normalized,” says Alina Clark, growth manager and co-founder of CocoDoc. “If you can't live without social media apps like Facebook and Instagram, then you definitely can do without some e-commerce apps like eBay, Uber eats, and Grubhub. Such apps have the largest hunger for your data when you remove social media apps from the conversation.”
To provide an example, Clark says that Uber Eats tracks and shares more than 50% of your personal data once installed on your phone. “One can see this by simply accessing the App permission settings on your iPhone,” Clark says. “Needless to say, such apps absolutely detest the fact that Apple introduced a new privacy policy to curb sharing of personal data to third parties.”
Your data on GrubHub or Uber Eats can be shared with marketers, who'll spam you with targeted ads and emails, or third parties who have no business accessing your data at all. “And that's the real risk,” Clark says. “The fact that such apps can share your data also means that they can share the same to unwanted people. You can save space by deleting the apps from your iPhone. Using dial-an-order would be a more private and better alternative to having all your data harvested by such apps.”
