Two of your social media apps could be collecting a lot of data on you — and you might not like what one of them is doing with it.
That’s according to a recent study, published last month by mobile marketing company URL Genius, which found that YouTube and TikTok track users’ personal data more than any other social media apps.
With third-party trackers, it’s essentially impossible to know who’s tracking your data or what information they’re collecting, from which posts you interact with — and how long you spend on each one — to your physical location and any other personal information you share with the app.
As the study noted, third-party trackers can track your activity on other sites even after you leave the app.
To conduct the study, URL Genius used the Record App Activity feature from Apple’s iOS to count how many different domains track a user’s activity across 10 different social media apps — YouTube, TikTok, Twitter, Telegram, LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, Messenger and Whatsapp — over the course of one visit, before you even log into your account.
YouTube and TikTok topped the other apps with 14 network contacts apiece, significantly higher than the study’s average number of six network contacts per app. Those numbers are all probably higher for users who are logged into accounts on those apps, the study noted.
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