5 Reasons to Be Careful With Free Apps During Quarantine

Expert advice from security researcher Marco Preuss

An endless supply of free entertainment and productivity apps are available in the palms of our hands, and they’re more tempting now than ever. But nothing is truly free, and in this case, it is likely paid for with your discreetly collected data. Free apps that harvest our private data are not going anywhere, since they bring valuable engagement to marketers and free stuff to users stuck inside their homes. But they continue to be a leading source of data compromise, and the experts tell us to avoid them and to limit what you share as much as humanly possible.

Kaspersky researcher Marco Preuss happens to be one such expert. He leads research into advanced cyber threats around the world and knows a privacy threat when he sees one. Marco recently gave me five reasons why free apps can be a danger:

They can violate your friends’ privacy

Data is often collected with someone’s permission — just not necessarily yours. When an app requests access to a user’s address-book, it doesn’t only affect that specific user but all of the users in that address book without their consent.

There’s no way to know if your data is actually being anonymized

Businesses that collect or buy user data often say their interest is in the broader patterns that mobile data reveals about consumers, rather than individual identities. But, as a consumer, you have no control over this data, and you likely don’t have a way to prove that it’s being anonymized.

The data can be stolen by malicious third parties

We have seen myriad examples in recent years that back-end systems containing user data can be hacked and leaked, which mostly turns into data abuse by criminals to conduct different kinds of attacks, including social engineering, identity theft, malware attacks and more.

They come pre-installed on your phone

People often overlook this threat. In a recent survey, 47% of respondents said they do not check the permissions of pre-installed apps. They also have less control over these apps, many of which can’t easily be uninstalled, if at all. We’re all being asked to put a lot of trust in our hardware vendors and app developers.

They create a digital trail that affects your real life

It’s hard to grasp the entire scope of what is being collected about you. Our smartphones are connected to so much of our digital lives, and are able to provide a fairly detailed footprint of our real lives. There may be consequences you’re not even aware of on your insurance rates, your job, your financial situation and even your relationships. Sometimes these consequences can be delayed, since quite often there is no limit on the length of time your data is stored.

Leaving behind some digital footsteps is unavoidable, but you can control the amount of data and the companies with whom you share it by being careful. Always do your best to check if an app you’re about to download comes from a valid developer. Remove apps you don’t need anymore. Check permissions on the ones you do want to use, and apply common sense (does, say, a flashlight app really need internet, geolocation, address book-access?). Restrict and control as much as you can.

Geolocation sharing can be especially invasive. Turn off these features, avoiding even those that are common to news and weather apps by using only apps and sites that allow you to simply set the location you care about. For news, you can use an RSS reader and add the sources you’re interested in.

Even before COVID-19, the rise in app usage on our devices was already growing at an incredible rate, with some predictions putting global annual app downloads at 258 billion by 2022 — a 45% increase since 2017.

A new spike in popularity is sure to open even more windows into our personal worlds. But even now, we still have a right to control what we don’t want to be publicly shared, especially when it comes to things like health and financial data, not to mention our thoughts and feelings and the people with whom we share them. Even if it feels like some level of sharing is inevitable, a little extra caution with the apps you use can still go a long way.