It is generally understood that apps, especially free ones, collect your personal data. But not all apps are created equal.
The analysis looked at apps in the Apple Store and judged them on how many data segments (a personal data point such as your name, a payment method or your precise location) and data types (groupings of segments such as 'Contact Info', 'Location' and 'Search History') they harvest from users.
The study named PayPal the most invasive finance app, as it requires permissions for 26 data segments. Besides the obvious financial information, it collects data segments on users' contact info, health and fitness, location, "sensitive info," contacts, user content, browsing history, search history, identifiers, purchases, usage data, diagnostics and "other data."
For financial apps, the second-most invasive was Square, Door Dash ranked third, QuickBooks Accounting came in fourth, and TurboTax was fifth. When looking at business intelligence apps (a separate category from finance apps), Zoho Analytics was deemed most invasive, though it collected only 13 data segments compared to PayPal's 26. Ranked below them was Domo, then Looker Mobile, then Microsoft Power BI, followed by Amazon QuickSight.
For the overall most intrusive apps, though, there was a tie between Facebook, Facebook Messenger, Instagram, Meta Business Suite, and Meta Ads Manager, all of them collecting 32 data segments from users. It's worth noting that these apps are all from the same company.
While some people may wish to look for apps that don't track your data, they will need to search far and wide for one. The analysis pointed to an
