Earlier this year, popular dating apps like Tinder and Grindr were found to be sharing leaking sensitive data to advertisers. People were rightly outraged. These are very personal apps that have a lot of extremely personal information about users.
How would you like it if an advertiser could use the contents of your intimate messages to learn more about you — and target you with “relevant” ads based on that? Of course, this happens all the time…when the product is free, we are the product! But with dating apps (and period trackers, apparently as well), this felt more personal.
The graphic below is just a taste of how a few apps shared personal data onwards to advertisers. And unfortunately this is a common practice — especially with free apps offered by obscure developers that only built the app to sell your data in the first place!
So the next time you’re about to download that app, think twice. And maybe read the privacy policy all the way through to see what rights you might be giving away to these unknown developers!
