A recent report from Incogni brought to light the fact that 65.2% of shopping apps grant ad networks access to user phones. Do note that the company researched apps available in the Play Store. This in itself is a threat to users’ online privacy, of course. Users do not expect their data to be shared with third parties.
Incogni doesn’t give full information about the exact shopping apps that have this flaw. The company does reveal that many of those apps are quite popular. So, for those who have some shopping apps installed on their Android devices, there is a probability that these apps are affected.
More information on Incogni’s research
Incogni analyzed 640 shopping apps. All these apps are available for download on the Google Play Store. According to the findings, two-thirds of the shopping apps in this research share user data with a good number of ad networks.
The user data available to these ad networks include contacts, device location, calendar events, and so much more. Some of these include data that the shopping apps request once users download them. The apps under consideration during this research all make use of ad library permissions.
By downloading these shopping apps, users also grant certain ad networks access to their data. The data collected by these ad networks will in turn be put to use when serving users ads on the internet. Incogni goes on to add that the “Android system does not distinguish between the host app and ad library.”
This gives the ad library or network all the permission to make use of the permissions given to the shopping app. If the ad networks these shopping apps come with have any malicious codes, it might cause harm to the apps’ user privacy. There is no current solution to this problem since Google Play Store is not yet able to distinguish between the shopping apps and the ad library. But users can avoid unknowingly giving access to these ad networks by shopping online instead of with an app.
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