Click here to visit Original posting
Dating and social media services are the most data-hungry applications you could use – you may already know that. What you may not, however, is that most of these apps regularly collect details of your political and religious beliefs to, among other things, sell them to third parties.
This is the shocking finding coming from new research conducted by Incogni, a data removal service developed by Surfshark, one of the best VPN apps on the market. Researchers looked at the data collection practices of the top 100 free apps across 36 categories in the US and found that 74 collected these highly sensitive details. Among these, the vast majority are dating apps (47), followed by seven social media services and six medical applications.
"While many apps that collect political beliefs offer it as an optional detail, the justifications given by app developers are often vague and questionable," Darius Belejevas, Head of Incogni, told me commenting on the findings.
Why do apps collect your political and religious affiliations?
As mentioned earlier, 74 apps out of the 3,400+ analyzed collect and sometimes share your political and religious affiliations. Fifteen applications make up the latter category.
This might not sound so bad looking at the numbers, but you get a different feeling if you consider that the most popular dating and social media services are the ones collecting these details the most.
The great majority of apps collecting political and religious beliefs – including the likes of Facebook, Messenger, Instagram, Bumble, Hinge, Badoo, and other dating apps – claim to do so for app functionality. Yet, researchers cannot see how this data could practically help developers improve the reliability, ease of use, and overall user experience.
Some others also motivate this collection for analytics purposes, including Hinge, Upward: Christian Dating App, YouVersion Bible App, or Receipt Hog: Cash for Receipts. Analytics is what service providers generally use to track visitors and measure app performance.