The New York Times has written a great dive into mobile apps that harvest data off your device, such as location data. Many of these companies feel entitled to harvest and store your data for things like location when you give consent for location access, and are in the business of selling that data to advertisers.
The book ‘1984,’ we’re kind of living it in a lot of ways.
Bill Kakis, a managing partner at Tell All
I’ve been removing a lot of the native apps I’ve relied on recently in favor of mobile web apps. I won’t let Facebook run code natively on any device I own, precisely because I know they go out of their way to capture every scrap of data they can. Running Instagram in a mobile web browser provides a much stronger sandbox, limiting the amount of data they can steal dramatically.
Apple and Google have largely destroyed any real marketplace for paid apps that don’t need to rely on selling data, and app review mechanisms have been unwilling or unable to protect customers from it. They deserve a huge share of blame for the status quo being what it is.