While we agree they come with a plethora of benefits, you just might be shocked to learn that they’re equally good at harming your privacy. By this, we mean collecting user data without taking prior consent. You just might be surprised to learn that 98% of them do it, and some more than others.
Here is a list comprising the top educational apps on iOS that you need to be aware of. The list comes to us thanks to Atlas VPN, which has gone through some painstaking efforts to investigate just how private popular educational apps can be. So let’s take a look!
One of the world’s most popular apps for learning a language, Duolingo came out on top in terms of data collection. It’s safe to say that this application is extremely data hungry because it grabs hold of data through 19 different segments. Keeping the same theme in mind, Google’s Classroom and Busuu are other top names, each getting data across 17 segments.
When we say segment here, we’re talking about contact details, financial information, and also the user’s location. As a whole, the company’s App Store differentiates into 14 different data types and nearly 32 different segments.
All apps included in the research were taken from a nice blend of book reading, education and technology, virtual learning, language, music learning, and study help. And all of those selected were taken from several leading iOS app charts this year.
The third position went to Chegg Study and Quizlet- again, two very prominent apps used to collect information across 16 different data segments. ClassDojo, Brainly, and Lumosity all came in the fourth position with 14 data segments. And the fifth position went to Masterclass and Remind.
It’s quite interesting how so many of the names taken in this list were also known offenders of privacy invasion across Android’s recently conducted app study. But what exactly these applications are collecting is a question that’s on plenty of minds.
Well, the answer is a little complicated. It’s a nice mix, but we must say that some types of data are more commonly observed than others.
As far as the most frequently collected data types are concerned, the answer is user IDs and device IDs. On average, they’re collected about 88% of the time. This is closely followed up by contact details like the user’s name, email ID, address, and phone number.
And it’s shocking to note how they’re also frequently after your usage data. By that, we mean product interactions. They're after it all, be it videos, audio, images, or diagnostic information.
Around 40% of these applications are after-purchase data like the user’s history of payments, and some go as far as wanting location history, like precise details of places visited.
22% are after users’ search history; to a smaller extent, some want information on browsing through these educational apps. And a smaller chunk of these apps is also looking forward to getting financial details like payment information and even contacts. Thankfully, the latter is very less, around 4%.
The most commonly encountered purpose has to do with app functionality, closely followed by analytics and personalization. Meanwhile, some of the data is used for the main purpose of a developer’s advertising strategy or to conduct better marketing. And then, a quarter of these apps make use of data for advertising via third parties.
So as you can see, most of these educational apps collect information in one manner or the other.
Read next: Microsoft Defender Continues To Work Well, But Is Slightly Marred By Technical Difficulties
by Dr. Hura Anwar via Digital Information World
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