Watch out – these are the personal finance apps most likely to steal away your personal data
With Black Friday 2023 just around the corner and consumer spending on the rise, many of us are turning to financial services apps to manage how we use our money amid an ongoing cost-of-living crisis.
The reality of these apps, says Merchant Machine, is that we share more data than is deemed necessary.
According to new research from September 2023 of 204 apps, each with more than 5,000 user reviews, the average app asked for 20 separate types of data. Some are collected legitimately for optimal functionality, but many fuel marketing and profiling.
All these apps collect unnecessary personal data
The study analyzed some of the most popular financial services apps in the iOS App Store, including apps for buy now, pay later, online banking, budgeting and money management, stock trading and investing, cashback, coupons and money transfer.
The app that collected the most data from consumers was “Robinhood: Investing for All,” which collected 25 different types of data. ‘PayPal – Send, Shop, Manage’, ‘PayPal Pay in 4’, ‘Klarna’ and ‘Groupon – Local Deals Near Me’ all also collected 21 or more types of data.
‘Chime – Mobile Banking’ and ‘Chase Mobile’ collected 23 and 20 categories of data respectively, and a number of UK banking apps, including ‘Monese: A Banking Alternative’, ‘Virgin Money Mobile Banking’ and ‘Starling Bank – Mobile Banking’ also proved very to be pushy.
Personal data is not just limited to some fairly obvious parameters, such as location, financial information and certain identifiers. Instead, Merchant Machine discovered that apps were collecting things like browsing history, search history, contact information, health and fitness data, and other sensitive information.
In contrast, ‘GO2Bank’, ‘RetailMeNot: Coupons, Cashback’ and ‘FreshBooks Accounting’ each collected only two types of data.
Ny Breaking asked for more information about why six of the most data-hungry apps collect the data they do: ‘Mint: Budget & Expense Manager’, ‘Klarna’, ‘Ibotta: Save & Earn Cash Back’, ‘PayPal – Send, Shop, Manage,” “Chime – Mobile Banking,” and “Robinhood – Investing for Everyone.” None immediately responded, but any updates will be posted here.
We also asked Apple directly whether it has overarching measures to ensure developers can’t collect unnecessary information.
In the meantime, users can limit the amount of information they share by revisiting their privacy settings and revoke certain permissions that are not a requirement for app functionality.