As artificial intelligence becomes more mainstream, AI-based smartphone apps, especially chatbots, have proliferated. However, a recent report found that the majority of these apps are not completely private as they send user data to third parties.
These are the findings of Home Security Heroes, a cybersecurity firm that examined 159 apps in the Apple App Store to determine how much user data they were sending. The company found that 75% of all such apps shared data with third parties. Depending on the app, AI may share information such as your browsing history, search history, system diagnostics, personal identifiers, location data, purchases, usage data, and the actual content you enter into these apps. .
Google’s learning app Socratic turned out to be the most intrusive AI app. Socratic shares his 35.71% of the user’s data with third parties. This includes data such as browsing history, contact information, identifiers, location information and search history. This was followed by apps Duolingo, AI ARTA, Chat AI, DaVinci and K Health. Each app shares 28.57% of the user’s data.
Many apps not only share data with third parties, but also monitor the data themselves, so app usage isn’t completely private. The survey found that 64% of AI-based apps monitor user activity to enhance their company’s marketing efforts. Brainly, a powerful math solving application, leads this group by monitoring his 42.86% of user’s personal data.
When it comes to app types, the ones related to productivity tend to get in the way the most. 73% of AI apps in this category were found to track user data, covering education, entertainment, graphics and design, photography and video, finance, and finally health and fitness. The most valuable data for a tracker seems to be usage data first, then identifiers and then contact information.
Researchers used Apple’s privacy label on the App Store. This label groups the types of user data collected by apps into 14 categories along with their respective purposes. Both “third party advertising” and “developer advertising or marketing” were examined in this study. To determine which apps share the most data with third parties, the “third-party advertising” section was analyzed and each app was given his 14-point score based on the number of categories measured. given a score.
Similar to the “Developer Advertising or Marketing” section, the “Developer advertising or marketing” section is used to identify the apps that collect the most user data for their own marketing purposes, with each app collecting 14 It was rated on a perfect score.
