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Which Apps are the Worst About Invading Your Privacy
Phone and tablet applications are a double-edged sword. On the one hand, there are so many fantastic apps for just about anything you can imagine. There are apps for exercise, eating right, studying the stars, gardening, gaming, learning a language, sports, budgeting your money, investing, house shopping, food shopping, any shopping. If you have a hobby, there’s probably an app for that, or one is on the way. There are many apps for work and productivity like meetings and messaging apps, document share apps, apps to hire freelancers, and apps to run your small business from top to bottom including scheduling and payroll! So how can something so good also be so bad?
While there are literally hundreds of useful free and paid apps, many are also logging your data and storing it. Some store it only to improve their code and features, others store it to sell to data brokers, and others store it analyze it and make decisions about creating new apps based on your user behavior. Storing your data itself may not be a very bad thing unless your data is being sold to third parties. The best way to find out is to read the apps privacy policy, if you can manage to get through the long, agonized material to the point of the matter, you should be able to find out if they are selling your personal information or are only keeping it for their improvement.
Some of the apps that are the worst about invading your privacy will state that they can do whatever they want with the information they gather about you. They will add something like “we retain the right to use, store and share your data with third parties,” or “we may share your data with third parties.” You could do a search for that within the text if you want to cut through all the convoluted legal babble. Apps that don’t honor your privacy will also turn on location services even though your location is not needed for the application’s use. Battery drain is a good indicator that an app is transmitting data back to the developers, so check your privacy settings in your phone or delete the app altogether.
If your privacy has already been breached and you find that your name and other personal information is showing up on various websites then you should do a complete multiple browser searches for your name and address. A good internet removal service can remove your address from the internet. Some are knowledgeable about how to remove google search results and how to delete information from the internet. If you use good judgment about the apps you download to your smartphone, tablet or other devices, you should be fine, but personal data privacy is becoming a huge issue that seems to be getting worse, not better. It’s important that we are all aware of where our data is going and for what purpose.
