The Real Cost of Free Apps
There’s no such thing as a free lunch (or apparently, a free app). While common sense tells us not to allow random strangers unrestricted access to our homes, that’s what we may inadvertently be doing when we download those free mobile apps. At least, that’s the finding from a recent study released by Appthority, a company that helps businesses identify and manage risks in mobile apps.
The company analyzed the top ten free apps from both the Apple App Store and Google Play using five categories: business, education, entertainment, finance, and games. The study examined free mobile apps since those were more likely to share data as a way to generate revenue.
The following are the highlights from Appthority’s February 2013 App Reputation Report:
- The vast majority of free apps send and receive data to outside parties without encryption.
- 96 percent of total apps share data with advertising networks and/or analytics companies.
- 79 percent of the top 50 free iOS and Android apps are associated with risky behaviors or privacy issues. Overall, iOS apps exhibited more risky behaviors than Android apps.
- Entertainment apps were the worst offenders, with the highest number of apps that track for location and share data with advertising networks and/or analytics companies.
- 14 percent of iOS apps had access to a user’s calendar, but none of the Android apps had similar access.
- More than half of the total apps track for location by accessing the device GPS or using other location tracking methods.
- More than 80 percent of apps across categories come from different unique, individual developers.
Many felt the report also debunked the perception that iOS apps are safer than those using Android.
Antone Gonsalves writes in ReadWriteMobile’s “Apple iOS Apps Leak More Personal Info Than Android” that while the report data may initially “find iOS and Android apps equally culpable of privacy violations,” that’s not necessarily the case.
According to the article:
A closer look, however, revealed that iOS apps were far leakier than their Android counterparts. A full 60% of iOS apps gathered your location data, 54% vacuumed up your contact lists and 14% siphoned information from your calendar. With Android apps, those percentages were 42%, 20% and zero, respectively—not exactly laudable, but certainly an improvement over the performance of Apple apps.
However, the report does underscore that developers of many of both the iOS and Android apps analyzed are unaware of, or not following, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) set of guidelines on best practices for mobile applications developers.
In "FTC Stresses 'Privacy by Design' for Mobile App Developers," we cite a company that found itself with an $800,000 fine for accessing users’ contacts without permission.
Free apps can be costly.
