Meta apps like Facebook, Instagram, and Threads are the most intrusive when it comes to mining and sharing users’ personal data, according to a new study.
Money Mongers looked at the top 100 most downloaded apps in the Apple App Store and focused on two categories: third-party advertising and developers’ own advertising and marketing.
There are 14 different data points under these categories, including purchases, location, contact information, user content, health and fitness, and financial information. Apps were scored based on the number of data points obtained in each category, and the average of the two data categories was used to create a single percentage score.
Unsurprisingly, Meta’s apps shared most of their users’ personal information, with Instagram, Threads, Facebook, and Messenger all sharing a whopping 86% of this information. This puts him 21 percentage points ahead of his closest offender, Linkedin.
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Threads, the Twitter/X killer promoted by Meta, may have the advantage of not following the whims of its new billionaire owners, but its users are paying the price. Research shows that Threads collects 72% more personal data than X.
Metaapp also collects most of the data for its own advertising and marketing benefits.
76% of the top 100 apps collect and share some form of user data, and 51% of them share user data with third parties. 72% of apps also collect data for their own marketing benefits.
Contact information is the most commonly collected data, with 92% of the top apps collecting it.
One of the under-reported and frightening aspects of this data collection is that 36 of the top 100 apps know about your browsing history across different apps and websites.
The top 10 apps account for 71% of personal data, and 4 of them are owned by Meta.
The likes of Uber, Linkedin and DoorDash (still not big players in Australia) are among the worst culprits overall, while the likes of Amazon, Spotify and Google are probably lower than expected.