Survey finds significant portion of popular apps send user personal information like email and location to Apple, Google, and other third parties
Abstract — What types of user data … Rob Beschizza / Boing Boing : Apps regularly spy on users; Android moreso than iOS Lulu Chang / Digital Trends : Third-party websites are getting a lot of your personal data from your mobile apps
Context & Ripple Effects
The survey lands three weeks after researchers caught 256 iOS apps collecting personal info through a third-party advertising SDK — a finding that pushed Apple to announce a ban on those apps. This new study widens the aperture from one SDK to the whole app ecosystem: email and location are flowing to Apple, Google, and other third parties as a matter of course, with Boing Boing's read that Android leaks more than iOS.
First-order effects
- Users of popular apps on both platforms learn their email addresses and locations are being transmitted to Apple, Google, and other third parties — data most assumed stayed on-device or with the app maker.
- Apple and Google are directly implicated as recipients, not just gatekeepers, putting their consumer privacy positioning at odds with what their own platforms' apps do.
Second-order effects
- Platform-level enforcement becomes the response lever rather than app-by-app fixes — following the pattern of Apple banning SDK-offending apps — while researchers keep auditing: later work found 24 iOS apps sending GPS and Wi-Fi identifiers to data-monetization firms (TechCrunch, 2018) and seven major Android apps still feeding launch data to Facebook (Privacy International, 2019).
Third-order effects
- The recurring audit pattern points to an enforcement gap that outlives policy changes — even after Apple's App Tracking Transparency framework, researchers found iOS apps transmitting identifying data despite user opt-outs, suggesting disclosure-based privacy regimes need technical verification, not just developer promises.
The trend: Mobile-app data sharing has become a permanently audited territory where each new transparency feature is tested within years by independent researchers finding workarounds.