Dating and social media services are the most data-hungry applications you could use – you may already know that. What you may not, however, is that most of these apps regularly collect details of your political and religious beliefs to, among other things, sell them to third parties.
This is the shocking finding coming from new research conducted by Incogni, a data removal service developed by Surfshark, one of the best VPN apps on the market. Researchers looked at the data collection practices of the top 100 free apps across 36 categories in the US and found that 74 collected these highly sensitive details. Among these, the vast majority are dating apps (47), followed by seven social media services and six medical applications.
"While many apps that collect political beliefs offer it as an optional detail, the justifications given by app developers are often vague and questionable," Darius Belejevas, Head of Incogni, told me commenting on the findings.
Why do apps collect your political and religious affiliations?
As mentioned earlier, 74 apps out of the 3,400+ analyzed collect and sometimes share your political and religious affiliations. Fifteen applications make up the latter category.
This might not sound so bad looking at the numbers, but you get a different feeling if you consider that the most popular dating and social media services are the ones collecting these details the most.
The great majority of apps collecting political and religious beliefs – including the likes of Facebook, Messenger, Instagram, Bumble, Hinge, Badoo, and other dating apps – claim to do so for app functionality. Yet, researchers cannot see how this data could practically help developers improve the reliability, ease of use, and overall user experience.
Some others also motivate this collection for analytics purposes, including Hinge, Upward: Christian Dating App, YouVersion Bible App, or Receipt Hog: Cash for Receipts. Analytics is what service providers generally use to track visitors and measure app performance.
"It’s hard to see how storing a user’s political profile or religious views could benefit apps’ analytics," Belejevas told me. "This should raise extreme concerns about the potential misuse of sensitive information.”
Personalization is another common reason for such data collection. Yet, researchers noted that while this makes sense for social and dating apps, it's a pretty questionable tactic when it comes to health apps such as BetterHelp – Therapy or finance services like Klover – Instant Cash Advance.
In some instances, motivations also include fraud prevention and account management. Again, it's hard to understand how knowing who I'd likely vote for can help developers carry out these tasks.
What are the risks?
As Belejevas explained, once information is disclosed to an app, it becomes vulnerable to exposure – whether that's from data breaches or unauthorized access. "This could lead to extremely private personal data falling into the wrong hands and becoming accessible to the greater public," he added.
Bumble, Tinder, and Facebook are just some of the apps collecting these very sensitive details that suffered major data breaches over the years. This includes a leak of over 70,000 Tinder photos of women ending up on a cyber-crime forum back in 2020.
There have also been instances of people's data purposely exploited during elections before. Take the Cambridge Analytica scandal, for example. The political consulting firm reportedly misused the personal information of up to 87 million Facebook users to target political advertising, predominately during Donald Trump's 2016 presidential campaign.
All in all, "many individuals may wish to keep their beliefs (and other sensitive information) private," noted researchers, adding that such exposure could even pose risks to the democratic electoral system more broadly.
How to protect your sensitive data
As mentioned earlier, security tools like virtual private networks and antivirus solutions cannot help here. This is because political and religious beliefs are all details you actively share from your personal account when using these services. Having said that, there are still some steps you can take to minimize the amount of data you share.
A joint-investigation from NordVPN and Incogni found that most Americans are worried about their data privacy and would like the internet to forget about them. Yet, they don't know exactly how to do that.
To minimize privacy risks within apps, Belejevas recommends avoiding disclosing information, especially when it is optional. Go back and review all your accounts while asking yourself – am I comfortable sharing this information? Why should the service provider know this about me in the first place?
As a rule of thumb, you should limit any kind of data over-sharing. This is especially important on social media platforms as our posts can often reveal very sensitive information about us, like our home address or workplace location, that even other users could abuse to their advantage.
Belejevas also suggests regularly checking your app permissions and your device's privacy settings to identify apps with intrusive tracking practices. "Apps that track large amounts of unnecessary online activity may harvest behavioral data to sell to brokers," he added.
This is why you may want to look into data removal solutions like Incogni as well. These services are perfect to help you remove all personal data that data brokers have on you with ease.
