I should have known if the apps free, you’re the product. Duolingo appears to harvest the most data compared to other language learning apps.
Source: Surfshark Research
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A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
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When it says purchase history, surely that’s not all your purchases?
Also, on iOS at least, many of these would ask for permission and be met with a “that’s a no from me dawg”. Things like photos, contacts, and location data for instance.
As a professional mobile app developer most of these lines are bullshit anyways.
Purchase history? Yeah that’s just if you’ve bought subscriptions to the service. Of course we fucking know your purchase history: if we didn’t how would you get anything with a purchase?
Crash analytics? Cool we get a stack trace of what happened when it crashed. Half the time it’s not even helpful because it’s buried deep in some fucking Java library.
Things like coarse location are getting more specific and a few lines here can be used to deanonymize you when used together but (or an advertising I’d which can be used to track you no matter what) but the majority of data passed to phone devs is us frantically trying to figure out what combination of make & model of android device combined with android version caused your app to crash.
Anonymity is important and we should all take it seriously. Most of this has jack shit to do with being anonymous.
Besides: ewa is listed as a paragon here when they collect advertising data, the most targeted and least anonymous of all data gathering.
Same with Android. I have all those disabled. Still good to know it’s possible if you don’t check and enable everything. Maybe a separate shape for options you can disable would make this chart look busier but give more info.
I agree it’s still good to know these things.
I also think there should be reasonable limits on what data they can try to access. Like do Uber need to know my location? Obviously, whilst I’m using the app, but they absolutely don’t need to access my contacts.