App Store: Google and Facebook experience a real data disaster

Google and Facebook collect a particularly large amount of data from their users, and this is made particularly clear by an innovation in Apple's App Store.

From now on, Apple wants to explain more precisely in its own app store which user data an app can access. For this purpose, there is now a new app privacy section, which is becoming a real data disaster for some large companies. The mandatory information reveals repeatedly and now directly "to the user" how data-hungry Facebook and Co. actually are.

Google, on the other hand, has simply not updated its iOS apps at all in the new year. They would like to do so soon, but so far there have been no new updates and therefore the information field "Data linked to you" is still empty. Facebook, on the other hand, has been exemplary, but this makes for a dramatic picture.

Kind of everything, right? What Facebook wants to know from us:

 

A comparison of various popular messengers alone shows that Facebook Messenger is an octopus with a thousand arms, even compared to WhatsApp. Signal, on the other hand, whose encryption method is also used by WhatsApp, is particularly exemplary:


Obvious to everyone: Facebook is the king of the data octopuses

But that's not the only comparison that looks downright dramatic for Facebook. A colleague shows how the table of iOS apps with the most data hunger is led exclusively by Facebook services. Of course, that includes the Instagram apps as well. Besides the main app, also Layout, Boomerang and Threads.


This sole table lead could look a bit different in a few days when Google adds its transparency information to the app store. That should happen in the first or second calendar week of the new year, it told Techcrunch in a statement. Meanwhile, Google could be thinking about similarly putting more emphasis on transparency in the Google Play Store.

Another problem also comes to light. Other apps also use services from Google, Facebook and others, and are therefore likely to collect a lot of data for the companies as well. Linking this data allows the services of these companies to be optimized, which in turn leads to more efficient provision of advertisements.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Chrome targeted by criminals: Why users need to update quickly now

A security vulnerability in Google Chrome is currently being exploited by cyber criminals. Malware could land on your PC through it. Read here how you can protect yourself. The Google Chrome browser is currently struggling with some security vulnerabilities. In a blog post , Google warns about a total of seven vulnerabilities, with the majority of these gaps being classified as a "high" threat to users. The vulnerabilities have been fixed in the latest version of Chrome for Windows, Linux and macOS. If you have Chrome version 90.0.4430.85 installed, it can no longer be exploited. If you have an older version of the browser installed, you should update urgently. You can find the download of the new version below these lines. Smartphone users do not have to be afraid of the security vulnerability. Google has not had to take any security measures here for the time being. The security vulnerability probably remained undiscovered by cyber criminals for the time being. So far, noth...
Read more

Face and voice recognition: Why TikTok wants to be allowed to collect biometric data in the USA

TikTok's privacy policy for the US now mentions the collection of biometric data from faces and voices. The background is likely to be a legal dispute that cost the company $92 million. Neue Datenschutzbestimmungen sind oft eher etwas für Juristen, doch die jüngste Aktualisierung von TikTok sollte alle Nutzerinnen und Nutzer in den USA aufhorchen lassen. Denn in den am 2. Juni aktualisierten Datenschutzbestimmungen für die USA ist ein Abschnitt enthalten, den es zuvor nicht gab. Er lautet übersetzt: »Wir sammeln möglicherweise biometrische Identifikationsmerkmale und biometrische Informationen, wie sie im US-Recht definiert sind, wie etwa von deinem Gesicht und deiner Stimme, aus deinen Inhalten.« Im englischsprachigen Original ist von »faceprint« und »voiceprint« die Rede. »Bevor wir damit anfangen«, frage man jedoch nach dem Einverständnis, wenn dies gesetzlich nötig sei, fügte noch TikTok hinzu. In response to an initial inquiry from "TechCrunch" about the ba...
Read more

Microsoft Teams, Zoom, WebEx: Berlin authority warns against popular video systems

After an initial data protection audit, some video service providers have made improvements to their offerings. But the Berlin data protection commissioner still sees serious shortcomings. The State Commissioner for Data Protection in Berlin (Germany), Maja Smoltczyk, advises against using leading video conferencing systems such as Microsoft Teams, Skype, Zoom, Google Meet, GoToMeeting, Teamviewer and Cisco WebEx. The reason is a retest of various offerings. After a number of services had already failed a test of data protection requirements last year, a new test of the major providers did not reveal any substantial improvement. Smoltczyk said that she was pleased "that our comments had persuaded so many providers to improve their offerings, in some cases very significantly, in terms of data protection". There are now enough legally compliant services for a wide range of purposes that there is no reason to break data protection law for video conferencing. However, if a provid...
Read more