Sneaky Apps And What To Do About Them

It seems each week brings with it a new story about personal information being leaked online. Still, despite some sites introducing new security measures to protect their customers, the leaks continue. Who’s to blame? Many times it’s the person we see in the mirror each morning, according to an infographic recently published by BackgroundCheck.org.

How many can relate to this scenario?

You visit a new website or begin using a shiny new app and are asked to provide personal information, such as your birthday, interests, or employment history. Later, you find out this information is used elsewhere on the site, or worse, somewhere else. While it is not illegal for sites or apps to collect this information, some sites are better than others at protecting this data. For example, Facebook has dramatically improved their privacy tools in recent years, after a major backlash. Now users can now tell them which data should be shared with which friends. Unfortunately, not everyone is using these tools. Only 37 percent of Facebook users say they have used the site’s privacy tools, with 8 percent of U.S. users saying they’ve never changed their privacy settings.

Who are the sneaky apps?

The report targets eight apps that have had a history of not securing their customer’s private information. These include: LinkedIn, Path, Girls Around Me, Glancee, Background Check, Bustedbook’s SpyGuide, Highlight, and Stealth SMS Parental Control. Luckily, many of these apps have since been improved and/or been shutdown all together. For example, after Path came under fire in February for automatically uploading iPhone users’ address books to their servers without permission, a new app update removed this capacity. Girls Around Me, meanwhile, was pulled from the App Store in March.

So what can you do?

When joining a site for the first time, make sure you provide as little personal information as possible. From there, learn about the site’s privacy policy and also check the tools that are available to users to protect their data. Plus, ask yourself this: Is the information you’re providing something you’d like shared with anonymous users? If the answer is no, don’t provide it. Finally, be sure to read BackgroundCheck’s entire infographic, which we’re providing here. Simply click on it to make it larger.