The arrival of Threads this week saw Meta taking another step into the social arena with its Twitter clone. There have been lots of entirely understandable concerns voiced about Twitter recently, particularly in light of the chaotic impact of Elon Musk, and this has led to swathes of disgruntled and worried users switching allegiances and joining the likes of Bluesky, Mastodon and, now, Threads.
How Threads' privacy policy compares to Twitter's (and its rivals') arstechnica.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from arstechnica.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
If you ve been following the news, you might know that WhatsApp recently updated its terms and privacy policy - meaning that the app now demands to share your data with Facebook and other third-party services. But it s not just WhatsApp. plenty of personal finance apps share personal data with third parties, too. To lift the lid on this murky practice, Surfshark analyzed the privacy policies of over
200 apps to find out which collect the most data and which collect the least.
Alternate Apps That Require Less Data
We compared privacy policies based on the 32 types of data that the Apple Store flags through their “nutrition label” initiative. Each colored square represents one type of data that each app collects. For example, Popcornflix harvests two types of
Third-Party Advertising • Location • Coarse Location • Identifiers • User ID • Usage Data • Advertising Data • Analytics • Purchases
Purchase History • Location • Coarse Location • Contact Info • Email Address • User Content
Photos or Videos • Audio Data • Customer Support • Other User Content • Search History • Search History
Identifiers• User ID • Device ID • Usage Data • Product Interaction • Advertising Data • Diagnostics •Crash Data • Performance Data • Other Diagnostic Data • Other Data • Other Data Types
Before you start thinking of popping Gmail in the bin, it s worth remembering that data collection is something almost all technology firms do as this is what allows them to provide a personalised experience. If you search for email from Dad with attachment in Gmail – to find that content, Google will need to scan your contacts, scour your entire inbox, and skim through the content of the emails to work out whic