It probably won’t surprise anyone that Facebook is at the top of the list.
A study by pCloud concluded that social media and food delivery apps sell the most personal data to third-party advertisers. But a recent survey showed that four out of five people don’t want their personal data collected or shared without their permission. If you’re sick of invasive data collection, what are the best alternatives?
Surfshark compared the data collection activities of 200 apps to find out which services harvest the most data in a given category, and which apps actually leave your data alone. The study compared 18 app categories and found that the more popular an app, the more data it likely collects.
Graphic courtesy of SurfShark
Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger—all owned by the same company—collect all 32 segments of personal data that Apple’s App Store flags. Less-invasive options include the audio-first Clubhouse social media app. Cisco Webex Meetings and disappearing messages app Dust are great alternatives for business and personal use, because neither service collects any data.
If you’re looking for privacy while searching the web, reading email, or streaming video, you should avoid Google’s products. Chrome takes 13 points of data, Gmail collects 19, and YouTube grabs a colossal 24. Instead, use alternatives Brave or Firefox Focus, or a private browsing window, and paid email service Spike, and Popcornflix or Kanopy for streaming video.
Looking at financial apps? PayPal takes a whopping 26 points of data compared to MoneyGram’s mere eight. Mint also gobbles up 21 points of data, while Mvelopes collects no data at all. Cryptominers, avoid Coinbase and its 18 data points: Choose Crypto Pro instead, which collects only personal identifiers.
Food delivery apps DoorDash and Caviar collect 24 points of data apiece, while apps like Postmates and ChowNow only collect 13. Instead of shopping on Amazon, which collects 26 points of data, try Etsy or Poshmark, which take only 12.
Surfshark’s study includes an interactive privacy tool that lets you see the most (and least) data-hungry apps. See where your favorite apps rank, and make the switch to a more privacy-focused alternative.
Though we at BLAKFX do not currently have consumer products for data protection, we can protect all user information for those firms that are collecting and storing it. For example, Facebook and Google could easily install our Helix22 SDK and this would ensure that user identities are secure. Any firm that has a data base of customers can ensure that a data leak of information will never happen.
If they were being really progressive, rather than having users opt out, they could offer secure and encrypted channels…maybe charge for these services. Of course, encrypted data can’t be collected and sold so that really doesn’t fit their business model, so they will never do it. For that firm though that uses customer data bases, data security can be a competitive advantage.
The Helix22 data security SDK accomplishes the following:
- Protects all your firms data at rest, in use and in transit
- Renders ransomware threats obsolete
- Eliminates human error
- Eliminates all malicious or interior attacks
- Verifies original content i.e. minimizes the threat of impersonation attacks and deep fakes
- Reduces latency
- Installs with 5 lines of code
- Runs on any platform, network, device and in any programming language
- Runs equally as well with any Cloud Service Provider and at the edge
- Provides perfect future/forward secrecy
- Delivers “zero-knowledge” encryption
- Compatible with all cloud, 3rd party and vendor services
- Is post quantum immune – so there’s no need to upgrade when the time comes
- Requires no employee training
- Exceeds all gov’t and banking standards
- Meets all international compliance regulations
BLAKFX is Based on Success
Founder – Robert Statica PhD Founder – Kara Coppa Founder – Alex Maslov MS, MBA
Co-Founders of Wickr KatimTM Ultra Secure Smartphone
Finally, the Helix22 encryption is quantum computing ready so no need to redo all your data security methodologies in a couple of years when everything else becomes obsolete.
We like to refer to Helix22 as “22nd Century Data Security.”
Helix22 – Zero Risk