Privacy Rankings of the Top 200 Free iOS Apps

[rejectconvenience]

Hey y'all, I made something kinda neat. This is a list of all the top 200 downloaded free apps from the iOS App Store, alongside their app privacy notices. I added a little write up with my line of thinking, but I think it's interesting! It's certainly no surprise that Meta leads the helm for the worst apps for privacy haha.

Anyways, here's the link: https://rejectconvenience.com/200-apps/

Let me know what y'all think!

[Linkard]

This is dope ! Do you plan on updating it once in a while ?

[rejectconvenience]

Yeah, given how frequently these apps change, I think it'd be worth tracking (and double check things, maybe things will improve for some apps, and get worse for others!)

[rejectconvenience]

I am currently adding a couple of other things I want to track, but it's gonna take some time to get everything gathered up (I'll probably add a new sheet below the current one so it's not so hectic).

• Which of these apps offer in app purchases
• Which of these apps require an in app purchase to function at all (for example, streaming services)
• Which of these apps have had a data incident in the last 5 years

On the front of which apps have had a data incident, I started to do that with the top ranking apps, and here's what I have found so far that I thought was interesting:

Note: This is for the top 60 most downloaded free apps from the same list, just in order of app store ranking, not privacy score. This is also data since 2018, but I think I want to do like "since 2020", "since 2015", etc. to showcase which ones have had a LOT of data incidents, and how recently they occurred. I also am currently defining "data incident" as any data breach related to the company. So if the target wasn't customer data, and rather employee data, I want to count that, because it's still a breach in the systems that you're supposed to trust. I might change this to be just customer data, but add a section for any data incident, because I think it's important.

• 6 out of the top 60 downloaded apps have not had a data incident
• Of those 6, only 1 of the apps does not collect data at all
• Of those 6, 3 of them did not exist over 2 years ago
• The remaining 2 apps had data incidents in 2017, so they're technically out of the range based on how I'm handling things currently

I think it's neat stuff. Is there anything else y'all think would be worth tracking? Maybe compared the privacy policy of the service to the one reported to Apple? Maybe add some clarity to the "Other Data" part, and add weight accordingly?

[rejectconvenience]

I have also now added the top 175 paid apps (I explain why it's 175 and not 200 in the page)

Neat observations there:

• The worst score in the paid apps is nearly 3 times lower than the worst free apps
• 131 of the 175 listed do not collect any identifying data at all (crazy stuff!)
• 5 apps do not have a proper report (or a privacy policy page at all)