Page 5 - Outsmart Cyberthreats

APPS THAT TRACK YOU THE MOST
OUTSMART CYBERTHREATS ➜ PAGE 5
principal about school pictures being taken the next day. Not awesome. Now your mom is really going to care about what clothes you wear.
6:45 PM: After dinner, you put in your ear buds, tee up a new Spotify playlist your sister shared, and search Amazon for new shoelaces to go with the sneakers you bought there last week.
7:50 PM: You sneak in some Netflix before 8 o’clock phones-off, just as a text comes in with an update to the game you got at lunch. Weird, but convenient, so you click the link and watch the file download before shutting down for the night.
After a day like this, your phone has learned about your sleep habits, clothes interests, sense of humor, musical tastes, game-playing habits, and footwear fashion sense. And that’s just for starters. Every time you interact with a company or an app online, you deliver even more information.
Companies have a voracious appetite for information. In a study to determine which apps gather the most data, every company named above was in the top 25. Besides obvious items like your email, name, and phone number, these apps also collect things like age, gender, geographical location, and home address. They even learn about your hobbies, bank account, and any pets you own. Oh, and often companies gather much of the same information about everyone you connect with through an app—your family, friends, online contacts, and so on.