Beware, popular Christmas apps are bad for your privacy
The Christmas season is all about being with family and having fun. But as classic board games are replaced by their online counterparts, your online privacy is increasingly at risk – not the best way to start the new year!
For example, five of the most popular Christmas-themed gaming apps are specifically related to Christmas. Worse still, free festive apps in particular consume a lot of data and reportedly share five times more data with third parties than their paid versions.
These are some of the worrying findings from new research conducted by Surfshark, one of the top VPN providers on the market. Keep reading as I explain everything you need to know to stay safe.
Christmas online gaming: how much data to collect?
To determine the real price we pay to enjoy festive apps, the Surfshark team analyzed the 21 most popular mobile gaming applications on the UK App Store across the board games, family games and Christmas lists.
These include games, but also countdowns (Santa Tracker, Christmas Countdown!), photo editing (ElfYourself), festive music (Christmas Radio+) and gift buying tools (Gifster).
The App Store provides a list of 35 unique data points, divided into 16 unique data point categories. The experts analyzed the dataset based on the number, type and processing of data points collected by each app. Needless to say, the team found most of these apps to be quite data hungry.
Make sure you delete any festive apps you downloaded after the holidays are over
While the average number of unique data points collected by the most popular festive apps is seven, some collect as many as 13 out of 35.
The digital adaptation of the famous board game Monopoli Go! tops the list of data-hungry apps with 13 unique data points collected. It’s all data tied to you, while 10 is actively used for online tracking. This means that the app shares your data, including your location, with data brokers or other third parties to build your profile on different websites for targeted advertising.
The third most popular free board game app, Hexa Sort, exhibits similar behavior, collecting 13 unique data points, 10 of which are tracked, including location and purchase history. Bubble Pop! and ElfYourself are also among the most data-hungry apps.
As expected, free apps collect and share the most data, and experts found that free Christmas gifts share five times more data with third parties than paid apps.
As Tomas Stamulis, Chief Security Officer at Surfshark, explains, mobile app developers are increasingly taking data protection regulations and requirements into account.
In the past, gaming apps often required broad access to your data, while today’s developers are more likely to focus on information that is actually necessary for the software to function properly.
Yet Surfshark’s research nevertheless shows how free applications consistently compromise your privacy by sharing significantly more data with third parties compared to paid apps. According to Stamulis, this underlines the importance of evaluating the consequences for privacy.
He said: “A responsible approach to data protection could encourage users to opt for paid versions of apps, look for alternative apps, or consider whether the app can function without granting permissions that may not actually be necessary. If such options are not provided. , it raises important questions about the intent behind the data collection.”
Another crucial thing to keep in mind is the aftermath of the Christmas season. Companies like Christmas Countdown!, Santa Tracker and Christmas Radio+ can track and share your location data with third parties, even if you stop using the app. As a rule of thumb, after the holidays you should delete any festive apps you’ve downloaded.
While security software like Virtual Private Network (VPN) and ad-blocking services can only increase your privacy a little – by masking your real IP address location and protecting your device from malware, for example – they can’t prevent the applications from tracking you. However, you can then use a data deletion service like Incognit to ask data brokers to delete any data they have about you.