Now that the App Privacy labels are available for the majority of the applications in the App Store, the list below reveals which application shares most of its users’ data with the third parties. The application that invades the most in its users’ private information is no surprise, i.e., one of the most widely used pictures sharing platforms, Instagram, followed by Facebook.
Instagram collects about 79 percent of users’ personal information, including location, contact info, data usage, search history, browsing history, contacts, purchases, and a lot more. Whereas the giant social communication application, Facebook, collects nearly 57 percent of its users’ personal data. This might be to your surprise that the video streaming applications YouTube and YouTube Music collect 43 percent of data that is shared with third parties.
The main purpose of collecting users’ data for third parties is to link the platforms using private information and target the audience for advertisement and marketing. According to Apple, with the launch of iOS 14.5, the apps that invade users’ private information will have to ask permission from every single user to access their details. In that way, many users will be able to prevent the big techs from scraping their personal yet sensitive information.
The applications that are safer to use since they don’t collect much of their users’ personal data include Signal, Telegram, Netflix, Skype, Clubhouse, Etsy, and Shazam.
Infographic by: Blog.pcloud.com
