Comment by zerocrates
5 years ago
On the privacy end of things, ads certainly aren't helping, but a pretty large number of even paid apps are happily vacuuming up data and sending them to the developer and often third parties (vendors of analytics/debugging platforms in particular). I tend to think of an app for most things as a loss of privacy and try to avoid using them when possible.
> a pretty large number of even paid apps are happily vacuuming up data and sending them to the developer and often third parties
Please name some examples. I certainly do not have not use nor know about any paid software that "vacuums" my actual data or tries to track me.
> analytics/debugging platforms
You cannot compare anonymous, aggregate details about overall usage of an app or crash stacktraces (which is what most paid/OSS apps do) to the kind of identification webs do for ads.
Again: native apps do not care about showing personalized ads to you nor their business depends on it.
> I tend to think of an app for most things as a loss of privacy
Mobile apps from vendors like Facebook definitely. Normal paid/OSS desktop software, no.