Instagram, Facebook, And LinkedIn Track User Data A Lot

Social media app (pCloud Blog)

JAKARTA - Various human needs and activities can currently be completed by applications. Starting from exchanging information with friends, meetings through virtual rooms, investing, to various forms of entertainment.

But, behind the comfort and convenience, there is a big price that we must pay. Some interesting applications in the form of money. Meanwhile, for the most part, it tracks user data. Yes, no privacy for personal data.

Recently, pCloud, a cloud computing service provider company, released a study entitled "The most invasive apps: which apps are sharing your personal data?"

In that study, pCloud found that 52 percent of apps installed on the device actually share user data with third parties.

Ranking in the top three is an application that is also widely used by Indonesians. Namely Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn. Meanwhile, Instagram is the application that collects most user privacy data.

The types of data collected by Instagram include transaction data, location, contact info, user contacts, search history, browsing application history, identity, data consumption, device diagnostics, and financial information.

"With more than 1 billion active users every month, it is quite worrying if Instagram becomes the center that shares such a large amount of user data," wrote pCloud in its official blog.

Pros and Cons of Sharing User Privacy Data

There are pros and cons regarding data retrieval by applications. On the one hand, the data collected can make the app offer a better experience. In addition, the application can also track itself if there are bugs and fix them.

On the other hand, user privacy data is also used to design targeted advertisements that will appear across platforms. For example, suppose you are looking for references and designs for local shoe brands via Instagram.

Once you open the Facebook platform, you will find ads for local shoe brands appearing on the homepage. Not only one, but it can also be two, three, sometimes even every time you refresh the page, ads from different brands will appear.

In a more extreme case, we finish browsing a certain product through Facebook, then the product ad appears on Google, or another platform.

This process is carried out by sending user privacy data to third parties. And according to pCloud's findings, nearly half of the apps that exist today do just that.

The third party is usually associated with the company that runs the application. Or certain parties who pay a fee to access user data. And usually, social analyst firms are the ones that make up the majority of these customers.

Examples are the company BuzzSumo or Hootsuit. The two companies collect user privacy data from various platforms for analysis. Furthermore, the results of the analysis are processed, then sold again to the buyer, the general public, or social observers.