Most Invasive AI Apps
Artificial Intelligence (AI) has stirred mixed emotions among tech enthusiasts, professionals, and users. Some believe the technology is the gateway to superior tech advancements, while others view it as a threat because of its ability to intrude on user privacy. But is there any truth to this claim?
By researching the most intrusive AI apps, we have mapped out the power of AI to intrude on your data. This report is a three-section summary of our findings on the invasive nature of AI applications.
How Did We Do This?
We used the 14 privacy labels on the App Store to figure out which AI apps tracked the most personal information about their users for marketing reasons. The number of privacy label an app has out of 14 determines how much personal information it monitored.
We looked into a total of 159 apps.
At the end of this article, the method is explained in full.
Key Insights
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- 75% of AI apps share users’ data with third parties
- 64% of investigated AI-powered apps track users’ personal data for their own marketing benefits
- Top 5 most invasive AI apps are:
- Tracking 43% of personal data for advertising activities
- Photoleap: AI Art Photo Editor
- Tracking 36% of personal data for advertising activities
- Google Assistant
- Socratic by Google
- DaVinci – AI Generated Art
- Facetune AI Photo/Video Editor
- Tracking 43% of personal data for advertising activities
- 54% apps track their users’ data for advertising and marketing
- On average, AI apps tracked 18% of users’ data for advertising benefits
75% Of AI Apps Share Users’ Data With Third Parties
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Only 25% of the 159 apps we studied do not share the data you submit to them. The rest are notorious for sharing user data with third parties, including other apps, or marketing companies.
The top 6 apps that share the most data for third-party advertising include:
- Google’s Socratic: 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 closely behind are apps like:
- Duolingo
- Chat AI
- DaVinci
- K Health
The apps each share as much as 28.57% of their users’ data.
64% Of Investigated Ai-Powered Apps Track Users’ Personal Data for Their Own Marketing Benefits
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Besides sharing the data you submit with unauthorized parties, AI-powered applications also track your data and use it to improve their marketing efforts. Simply put, they monitor what users need and generate data for marketing campaigns to show the apps can respond to these needs.
The examination of AI apps that track the most personal data for their own advertising activities reveals that:
- Socratic, Photoleap, and Facetune track significant amounts of personal data, 35.71%.
Even more alarming is that only 20 apps out of 159 apps we studied track less than 10% of user data for marketing purposes.
Most Invasive AI Apps
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There is enough evidence to state that artificial intelligence-backed applications intrude on user privacy sufficiently. At least 54.09% of apps track users’ data to improve their advertising and marketing outcomes, according to our analysis.
Photoleap ranks as the most invasive AI app, tracking at least 42.86% of users’ data.
Following closely behind are two apps from Google: Socratic and Google Assistant—these, as well as DaVinci and Facetune, all track 35.71% of users’ data.
However, there is still some hope for AI-powered applications. Some of these apps refuse entirely to track any personal data associated with their users. Below are the apps that are safest to use.
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Which Types of Personal Data Most Desirable to AI Apps?
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Users’ data has different values. Certain data is more valuable to AI-driven applications because of how it can be used to advance the application’s interests.
Out of the 14 types of data App Store lists, Usage Data is the most tracked. 41% of applications track usage data. This information shows the average number of times the user accessed the apps. It can also show the duration of usage and the various app features accessed and includes details about how the user interacts with the app and which ads the user has seen.
74.11% of AI apps also track Identifiers. These are a set of unique serial numbers or character strings that are specific to a user’s device. They include user IDs, such as a screen name, handle, and account ID, and device IDs, including category identifiers, such as the device’s advertising identifier.
15.8% of the apps track contact information. Contact info includes personally identifiable information such as name and address.
Which AI-App Category Is the Most Data-Hungry?
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The extent to which AI-powered applications monitor user data varies by app category. The most data-hungry app category is Productivity. Apps within this classification track the most user data, with a tracking percentage of at least 71.43%. This category contains apps such as chatbots inspired by chatGPT, such as Chat AI, and virtual assistants, such as Google Assistant; these apps are also the most intrusive.
Methodology
To map out the intrusive nature of AI-driven applications, we followed a well-guided and easy-to-follow methodology that investigated a total of 159 applications on Apple’s App Store.
We 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 they 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.