Three quarters of AI apps send data to third parties

As artificial intelligence becomes increasingly mainstreamed, AI-based smartphone apps — especially chatbots — have proliferated. But a recent report has found that the vast majority of these apps aren't entirely private as they send user data to third parties.

These were the findings of cybersecurity company Home Security Heroes, which examined 159 apps in the Apple App Store and judged them for how much user data they were sending out. The company found that 75% of such apps overall share data with third parties. Depending on the app, the AI could be sharing information like a user's browsing history, search history, system diagnostics, personal identifiers, location data, purchases, usage data and the actual content users put into these apps.

Learning app Socratic by Google was found to be the most intrusive AI app. Socratic shares 35.71% of users' data with third parties. This includes data such as browsing history, contact info, identifiers, location and search history. Following that were the apps Duolingo, Chat AI, DaVinci and K Health. The apps each share as much as 28.57% of their users' data.

Many apps, in addition to sharing data with third parties, also monitor the data themselves, meaning their use is not entirely private. The study found that 64% of AI-based apps monitor user activity in order to bolster the company's own marketing efforts. Brainly, a powerful math-solving application, leads this group by monitoring 42.86% of users' personal data. 

When it comes to app types, the most intrusive tends to be those connected with productivity, as 73% of AI apps in this category were found to track user data, followed by those for education, entertainment, graphics and design, photo and video, finance and, finally, health and fitness. The most valuable data for trackers appears to be, first, usage data, followed by identifiers, followed by contact information.

Researchers used Apple's privacy labels on the App Store, which categorize the sorts of user data collected by apps into 14 categories, along with their respective purposes. Both "Third Party Advertising" and "Developer's Advertising or Marketing" were examined in the research. To determine which apps share the most data with third parties, the "Third Party Advertising" section was analyzed, and each app was given a score out of 14 based on the number of categories it measured. 

Similar to the "Developer's Advertising or Marketing" section, the "Developer's Advertising or Marketing" section was used to identify apps that collect the most user data for their own marketing purposes, with each app rated out of 14.