Are Apps Collecting Your Data?

Every second on the Internet, 946 Instagram photos are uploaded, 8,690 Tweets are sent, 77,783 Google searches are made, and 2,845,459 emails are sent. Added together, we generate 250 million terabytes of new data every day. Many app developers track your data to generate more ad revenue from their apps. For example, Google tracks much more than just your search history and email. By 2025, the data economy (the market for in-app advertising) will reach $234 billion. 

Each Google user’s data is worth approx. $182 - for Facebook, it’s $158. Ad networks will pay more to reach iPhone than Android, leaving to ramp fraud and data breaches. For example, click fraud. This is when developers generate revenue by placing false ad calls. Rather than disrupting the experience, the ad is played in the background.

However, you do not need to use social media for your data to be compromised. In one experiment, researchers had collected enough user data to predict what someone would post on social media with 95% accuracy - even if that person never had an account.

More than 9 in 10 Americans feel they have lost their data to miners. Your data belongs to you. More information on keeping your data private can be found below.