You may have your own personal reasons for considering keeping few social media apps on your phone. From the fact that they are time-consuming and could be thwarting your work goals to the fact they are resource-intensive and draining on your phone’s battery, the list of reasons for doing away them is lengthy. But, at the end of the day, it’s a battle between how badly you want to connect with others via these apps, and how important things like tech security and privacy are to you.
There’s no way around it: many social media apps are tracking your location and collecting your data. They may argue that they need to take some of these steps to deliver the best experience possible, but at the end of the day, it’s up to you how much you let them know about your life. Here are five apps that are known for these practices.
We’ve long known that Facebook tracks our location data so that it can sell it to advertisers, who then turn around and send us a lot of targeted ads. As a rule of thumb, if an app is completely free, there’s a chance it will try to profit off of users in other ways, and this is one of those ways. Facebook uses Location Services to track your phone’s GPS coordinates, your IP address whereabouts, and it tracks your activity to learn more about you, your behaviors, and your purchases. If that all sounds creepy to you, make sure you disable location services for Facebook and any other settings that give it access to your data.
It’s no wonder that Instagram, which (like Facebook) is owned by Meta, also tracks your location. Even if you have Location Services disabled on your device, Instagram can gather information about your location based on information that you and your connections provide through posts you create and respond to. For example, if you post a photo and tag yourself at a museum in a certain city, don’t be surprised when you begin receiving advertising for art and other cultural activities within that same city. Instagram can also gather information about you via your IP address.
TikTok
TikTok has access to your IP address, your search history, location, and even which videos you’re viewing and how long they keep you engaged. It then takes this data and sells it to advertisers. You can mitigate some of this by going into the Settings and Privacy setting in the TikTok apps, selecting Privacy, and tapping Location Services to adjust it for your needs.
Snapchat
Snapchat collects a lot of different data — and location is just one, even if you have location tracking turned off. Snapchat uses real-time location tracking and is continually gather location data as you use the app. If you turn on “Ghost Mode” in Snapchat’s settings you’ll at least hide your location on your Snapchat map, which keeps you a little more private.
Twitter
Every time you tweet, Twitter can figure out where you’re tweeting from. The app is free to sell your data to advertisers and some of the personal information it gathers includes your interests based on your tweets, the apps and websites you frequent most often, all of the devices you use to access Twitter, and every tweet you post. If you don’t want to delete Twitter, one thing you can do is change up some of its settings to keep your more private. Go to Settings and Privacy > Privacy and Safety > Content you see > and disable or enable settings based on how much privacy you need.
