The Popular iPhone App That Could Be Sharing Your Data–You Need To Delete It Immediately!

If you already know the ins and outs of Facebook and its data-sharing dilemma, you might have switched over to a similar, but different app like Instagram to get your social media fix. Olivia Tan, the co-founder of CocoFax, reminds us that Facebook isn’t the only social media using your data. “Instagram shares a daunting amount of 79% of data with other organizations,” Tan says. “Such information includes buying details, browsing history, and personal data. Having more than 1 billion monthly active users, it is a terrifying matter that Instagram is a popular hub for sharing a colossal amount of unknowing user's data.”

According to Tan, Instagram collects your data to provide you a better experience, optimize their seamless work, and identify how you interact with them to correct bugs. “So, these are done by sharing your data with third parties,” Tan says. “Such third parties might be integrated with that company that operates the app or paying an amount to access their user's data. In order to stop Instagram from sharing your data with a third party, you should uninstall the app.”

And even though social media apps are the biggest culprits of data sharing, they've become so commonplace that the practice has pretty much been normalized, says Alina Clark, growth manager and co-founder of CocoDoc. As a result, Clark says there are other apps to keep on your radar, as well. 

“If you can't live without social media apps like Facebook and Instagram, then you definitely can do without some e-commerce apps like eBay, Uber eats, and Grubhub,” Clark says. “Such apps have the largest hunger for your data when you remove social media apps from the conversation. For instance, Uber Eats tracks and shares more than 50% of your personal data once installed on your phone. One can see this by simply accessing the App permission settings on your iPhone. Needless to say, such apps absolutely detest the fact that Apple introduced a new privacy policy to curb sharing of personal data to third parties.”

So, the good news is that Apple will attempt to curb some of this data-sharing — but your best bet is still to avoid using those apps that are among the most offensive when it comes to using your data.