Instagram and Facebook are said to be the applications that share users’ personal data with other companies the most. Instagram data collected by the two ranges. From the user’s birth date to the user’s habit of starting to open the application.
“Social media giants like Instagram and Facebook aim to collect as much user data as possible, rather than prioritizing protecting their privacy,” explained Ivan Dimitrov, digital marketing manager at pCloud.
79% of Instagram User Data is Spread
There are 79 percent of Instagram user data is shared with other companies. Instagram’s parent company, Facebook, came in second, providing 57 percent of user data. Meanwhile, LinkedIn and Uber Eats both sell 50 percent of their user data.
This is based on a study conducted by cloud storage service provider, pCloud. Cloud storage is a service that is similar to Apple iCloud and Google Drive.
This company analyzes any applications that often share user personal data. This study is based on Apple’s new privacy label implemented in the App Store. They conducted this study based on three categories, namely tracking, third-party advertising, and based on developer or marketing advertising.
What is personal data for?
Overall, 52 percent of existing apps do share user data with third parties. The applications pCloud analyzed are the ones that are frequently used by everyday users.
The third party in question could be another company connected to a company running certain applications. These third parties could also be those who pay a certain amount of money to access user data.
The pCloud study also states that 80 percent of apps use this user data for marketing. For example, it is used to serve advertisements for their own services on other platforms, as well as in-app ads to make a profit, as reported by Tech Radar.
Facebook and Instagram top the list of apps that collect user data for their own benefit and both services use 86 percent of their user data to sell their own products and serve relevant ads on behalf of others.
“Although sometimes applications need to pass certain information to third parties to help them provide services, (but) a large number of applications actually do it for their own benefit, not for their users,” Dimitrov said as quoted by Forbes.
“Taking advantage of sharing personal information is becoming more of a proliferation in modern online practice.”
Application that safe for user data
Meanwhile, a number of other applications are considered to have the best policies to protect user personal data.
Signal, Clubhouse, Netflix, Microsoft Teams, Google Classroom, Shazam, Etsy, Skype, Boohoo, Amtrack, Zoom, Shop and IRS2Go are all said to not collect data about their users.
The company also ranked more than 100 of the world’s most popular apps based on how invasive they were to reveal that Instagram, Facebook, Uber Eats, Trainline and eBay track the highest percentage of personal data overall.
Although an application is considered comfortable to use, users must consider the security of user data before downloading it on the App Store or Google Play Store.
