Technology
Worst iPhone apps for ‘invading your privacy’ revealed – including Facebook, Just Eat and Uber
THE most invasive apps on your iPhone have been revealed by a study into how much our favourite services snoop on their users.
Instagram and Facebook are among the “worst” offenders, according to the analysis, which tracked how much data is hoovered up by the App Store’s most popular downloads.
An analysis of popular apps has revealed the most invasive downloads on your iPhone[/caption]
Other intrusive apps singled out by researchers include LinkedIn, Uber, Just Eat and even ticketing app The Trainline.
The investigation published earlier this month was carried out by experts at Swiss cloud storage service pCloud.
In a blog post on the findings, they said that an app’s invasiveness was assessed using the “privacy labels” recently added to Apple’s App Store.
The labels show how an app will use your personal data, such as tracking your location, contacts, browsing history, online purchases and more.
Facebook and Instagram were among the worst offenders singled out by researchers[/caption]
Data is often used to target adverts, as well as to help fix bugs and improve how apps work. In some cases, it’s shared with other companies.
“We looked at the concerns surrounding mobile apps, working out which ones require the most information in exchange for using them,” the researchers wrote.
“By using the new Apple privacy labels, we identified which apps share the most of your private data with third parties and which gather the most for their own benefits, to find the most invasive overall.”
For their study, the team counted the number of privacy label categories each app is listed as tracking.
Researchers created a table to highlight the worst offenders[/caption]
Apple lists the data disclosed by apps into 14 categories: Browsing History, Contact Info, Contacts, Diagnostics, Financial Info, Health and Fitness, Identifiers, Location, Purchases, Search History, Sensitive Info, Usage Data, User Content and Other Data.
Of these 14 categories, Instagram shared 11 (79%) with other companies, making it the worst offender, according to the researchers.
The app sends everything from purchasing information, personal data, and browsing history to third parties, which use that data to show you ads.
“It’s worrying that Instagram is a hub for sharing such a high amount of its unknowing users’ data,” researchers wrote.
Uber was also found to collected reams of data from its users[/caption]
In second place was Facebook (57%), followed by LinkedIn (50%), Uber Eats (50%), Trainline (43%) and YouTube (43%).
Other apps may not share data with other companies, but instead gobble it up for their own advertising purposes.
Food delivery apps Grubhub & Uber Eats are amongst the worst apps for collecting your data for internal marketing, researchers said.
Among the “least” invasive were Microsoft Teams, Netflix, Signal, Telegram, and Zoom.
None of these apps tracked data for marketing or advertising purposes for use by themselves or by third parties.
iPhone tricks to try today
Here are some of the best…
- Typing cursor – When typing, hold down the space bar to turn your keyboard into a trackpad, letting you move around words and sentences more easily
- Close all Safari tabs – To do this in one go, simply hold the overlapped squares in the bottom right-hand corner, and press close all tabs
- Delete lots of photos quickly – Hold down on a photo and then drag your finger diagonally in Photos to select lots of images at once, then hit delete
- Convert currency quickly – Swipe down from the top of your Home screen (or swipe left to right on an iPhone X or later model), then tap in the bar and type a currency (like $200) and it will automatically covert to your local currency
- Check if you’re due a battery upgrade – Batteries inside smartphones degrade over time. Just go to Settings > Battery > Battery Health, and check out the Maximum Capacity reading. Generally a battery is considered worn when you’re down to 80% capacity. If you’re below, you can buy a battery swap from Apple
- Move apps around faster – Hold an app until it starts wiggling, then (while still holding) tap other apps, causing them to stack so you can move them around easier
If you’re worried about what your downloads are snooping on, make sure you pay attention to each app’s permissions.
When you first open an app, it asks you for permissions which you can grant, deny or grant only while using the app.
The safest bet that still nets you full use of the app is the third option.
You can also alter what permissions your apps have by heading to your Settings app and scrolling all the way to the bottom.
Select an app from the list to review what data it can access.
Most read in Phones & Gadgets
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What’s your favourite iPhone app? Let us know in the comments!
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