Is your favorite app spying on you too?

If the product is free, then you are the product.

Everyone who uses apps pays a hidden price: the price of their own personal data. While we use them in our daily lives, apps collect information about us that can be used by them or sold on to others. From browsing history to phone contact lists, there is usually very little information that is safe from them. The personal data that applications collect about us can, for example, help third parties better understand their target audience and reach them with tailored advertising messages. As data protection experts, the heyData team wanted to find out which mobile apps spy the most and are at the very front when it comes to gaining access to personal data.

However, apps must ask for permission in order to access our personal data. Many app users are not aware of when this happens. By accepting an app’s terms and conditions without reading them, you may already be granting permission to access personal data. In other cases, nicely worded pop-ups such as “We value your privacy” or “Help us improve” may in fact be an app’s access request, allowing it to use personal data. By analyzing hundreds of popular, freely available apps on Google Play, we found out which apps in Germany make the most requests to collect personal data. The result is the list of the top spy apps!

For the full table and a deeper analysis, click on the image or the links. We identified the top spying apps in Germany by analyzing popular apps in the Google Play Store:

Source: heyData Embed Created with Datawrapper

Our approach to ranking 

The aim of the study was to find out which apps make the most requests for access to personal data. In April 2022, we examined 250 of the most popular apps freely available in the Google Play App Store in Germany, including apps for social media, fitness, dating, music, news, and transportation. For every mobile application available on Google Play, there is a corresponding landing page on play.google.com. These landing pages provide further information about the app, including the data for which the app requests access permission. This information can be found under the “Permissions” section.

We then recorded all the different permission requests, with the apps making the highest number of access requests being considered the apps that spy the most. The list of 250 apps was reduced to a final list of 100, which is ultimately available here.