5 Social Media Apps Experts Say To Remove Because They Track Your Location & Collect Data

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.