This month’s issue of National Geographic had an eye-opening article titled ‘Unveiling the Secrets of Apps.’ It shared insights from Clario, an internet security company, about the personal data collected via app EULAs. Some findings were expected, but others were quite surprising! 🌟
As expected, Meta’s Facebook app took the crown for data collection. It wasn’t thrilled about Apple’s iOS ATT (App Tracking Transparency) update. Facebook collects everything from personal info to facial and background recognition data through images. As image recognition is a rapidly evolving field in deep learning, they’re bound to gather even more detailed info. On the flip side, Gmail surprisingly collects minimal data—just your name, age, and contact details. Honestly, that’s kind of unexpected. 😅
These research results are confined to categories selected by the survey company, giving the impression that Google is keen on privacy. However, Google uses NLP (Natural Language Processing) to understand the intent of email content, collecting tons of direct and indirect personal data. Remember Google Trips? It collected your booking info from emails to organize your travels—shocking, right? 😲 It’s no wonder it disappeared, likely due to privacy concerns. Could be wrong, but Facebook does similar things anyway.
Clario based its findings on explicitly entered field values, leading to these results. Now that this article is out in National Geographic, the world might bash Meta again and trust Google. Just like life’s little twists, I want to tell the readers of this article…
They’re all just the same…
…and that’s the truth. 😉
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