More apps sending personal data to Facebook: study

More than apps sending personal data to Facebook: study

Twenty out of 34 apps send data to Facebook when users kickoff open it

In a new study, U.K.-based privacy watchdog Privacy International found that 61 percent of apps "automatically transfer data to facebook to moment a user opens the app."

Privacy International said popular apps that transfer data automatically include travel apps Kayak, TripAdvisor, Skyscanner, and fettle tracker MyFitnessPal.

The study, titled How Apps on Android Share Data with Facebook (Fifty-fifty if you don't have Facebook account), said information technology tested 34 apps, out of which 20 apps sent information including analytics data besides as a person's unique Android ID.

On apps like Kayak, data that gets sent include destination, flight search data, travel dates, and whether kids volition be part of the travel, it said.

The report added that it was not able to find out what the data was used for and that information technology raises "questions about transparency and use of app information."

It said that the apps that transfer data also include the Google advertising ID, which is used to let advertisers to link data about a users' behaviour.

"If combined, information from different apps can paint a fine-grained and intimate moving picture of people'due south activities, interests, behaviours and routines, some of which can reveal special category data,thousand including information virtually people'due south health or organized religion," the report said.

Facebook responded to the report on December 28th, 2018, proverb that the social media giant installed a voluntary feature that should allow developers to delay collecting automatically logged events until after they acquire user consent. This characteristic was launched a few months later on the EU General Data Protection Regulation entered into forcefulness.

Though this characteristic only works on Facebook software developer kit (SDK) version 4.34 and later.

The report suggests recommendations for Facebook including better explaining how it uses information that information technology automatically gets through Facebook SDK and how long this data is stored for.

Information technology also noted that Facebook should also offer meliorate services to make developers hands "protect the privacy of their users by design and by default." It added that Facebook should besides make it easier for people to exercise their information rights on all "personal information that Facebook stores, whether they accept a Facebook account or not."

Further, the study highlights recommendations for users on how to protect their data.

Privacy International said information technology tested the apps betwixt August and December 2018, "with the last re-test happening betwixt iii and 11 of Dec 2018."

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Source: Privacy International Via: Engadget