Companies often share your data with third parties so they can improve their services and can provide you with better recommendations that are more relevant to you. But at the time some apps share a lot of consumers personal data with others for earning revenue and any benefit to consumers
One such App the world is habitual of using is Facebook. Facebook has always been the app that has been under expert’s radars for sharing too much information with third-parties. But as per new research, Instagram (also owned by Facebook) is even ahead of its parent company in collecting and sharing user information.
As per a recent study conducted by pCloud, Instagram shares 79% of your data including everything from purchasing information, personal data, and browsing history with others online. This is 22% more than what Facebook shares. Facebook has always been seen as a company that shares the most amount of users data but it seems like Instagram has always been much less private than we have believed it to be.
Facebook isn’t much far away though, as it comes in at second position right after Instagram, sharing 57% of the data. This doesn’t make Facebook any better than Instagram as the amount of data that is being collected and shared is still a lot.
Talking about the app’s own benefit, Instagram and Facebook both collect 86% of the personal data for their own benefit. The benefit here is defined as the company’s own products and services that it tries to sell by showing you ads of their own and on behalf of others, which are relevant to you.
If that wasn’t enough, Instagram also makes it to the top when it comes to how invasive an app can get. Of all the data collected, Instagram shares 62% of data with third parties that is used later for marketing. This is 7% more than the data which is shared by Facebook itself, which shares 55% of the total data it collects.
Other Apps that share your data
Companies such as LinkedIn and Uber Eats closely follow as both sell off 50% of the collected data. In fact, when it comes to food apps, Just Eat, Grubhub and My McDonald’s are the only three in our study that gives nothing away at all.
It might be surprising to you but even YouTube has made it to the list of apps that share your data. Not only this, the app comes in at 6th position sharing 42% of your personal data elsewhere, whenever you search for a video. This data is used by the platform to show you relevant ads which you see in between the video or at the beginning, along with being shared with other platforms.
The study at pCloud revealed that 80% of apps use your data to market their own products in the app and beyond.
Safest apps
As per the report Skype, Microsoft Teams, and Google Classroom collect no data at all and top the list of safest apps alongside Clubhouse, Netflix, and Signal.
WhatsApp, which has faced several allegations in the past for sharing data, shares only 5% of data which is good, considering how much data is shared by its parent company.
‘While these apps can be trusted not to do anything malicious with your information, there are lots of people out there who can’t. That’s why it’s important to have a secure place to store your data, preventing anyone from accessing it without your permission’, said pCloud.