11 Everyday Apps That Are Tracking Your Activity

Some of these apps have become part of people’s daily routines, which might not be ideal for folks worried about these programs tracking their activity.

Companies collect all this data for multiple purposes, including personalized advertising, sharing it with third parties, user analytics, product personalization, and optimizing app functionality. Given that privacy has become a pressing concern more than ever, most people want to know which apps they use regularly that track their activity. After all, awareness is the first step most people will take in the journey to safeguarding their privacy.

The first thing to do is navigate over to the “Accounts Center” tab in the “Settings & privacy” section, which can be accessed from Facebook’s settings. From here, navigate to “Your information and permissions” and tap on “Your activity on Meta technologies.” Select “Recent activity,” and you’ll see a bunch of apps and services you use that have interacted with Facebook. It’s in your best interest to choose “Disconnect specific activity” and select all these programs to unlink them from your Facebook. It’s also recommended that you choose “Clear previous activity” to remove all activity history. Finally, to avoid having to do this again, go to “Manage future activity” and select “Disconnect future activity” to prevent your data from being exploited.

People who want to review the data Instagram collects can use its hidden features to download it. After all, it’s always good to be on top of the exact metrics being collected on your end. From the “Accounts Center” tab, go to “Your information and permissions.” You should see an option to “Export your information.” From there, you can initiate the process of exporting your data, either on your phone or to a cloud service. Choose how much information you want to export, the time period when this data was harvested, its format, and overall media quality. This way, you’ll figure out exactly how Instagram has tracked your activity, giving you peace of mind that this data won’t be used again… provided you opted out of Meta’s data-tracking endeavors.

Sure, BrowserGate refers to LinkedIn’s activities on Chrome, but that doesn’t mean you should ignore what Microsoft is doing with this app on your phone. After all, the company faced yet another controversy in 2012 when it was revealed that its iOS app was checking calendar entries and transferring this information to its services, including sensitive data like passwords, per CNET.

The best thing to do here is to go to Settings in the app by tapping on your profile picture and selecting “Advertising data.” Turn off everything here across all three sections — “Profile data,” “Activity and inferred data,” and “Off Linked data.” This way, you’ll gain a modicum of control over your data and how LinkedIn uses it, which makes a world of difference.

To mitigate this, the first thing you can do is go to “Your account” and deselect any products that can be used to send you tailor-made recommendations. We also recommend that you go to “App Settings” from your profile and tap “Permissions,” where you can restrict Amazon’s access to sensitive data from your Bluetooth connections, camera, contacts, location services, microphone, text messages, and phone data. As a final step, you can avoid using the Amazon app and instead use privacy-focused browsers like Brave and DuckDuckGo for all your e-commerce needs. It may be an extreme step, but it goes a long way in preventing your data from being harvested by this conglomerate.

If you want to opt out of these practices, it’s time to start using some truly powerful YouTube features. The first thing you should do is navigate to Settings in the YouTube app and select “Your data in YouTube.” You’ll be redirected to the YouTube section of your Google account’s privacy dashboard. From here, you can download your data, a practice many apps are adopting to improve data transparency. Your watch and search history — voice included — can also be turned off to prevent YouTube from using this data to personalize your algorithm.

For starters, go to “Your account” to find the option to download a data archive that contains a record of all the information X stores. In “Security and account access,” you can check both “Apps and sessions” and “Connected accounts” to see which third-party apps are linked to your X account. You can revoke permissions and restrict access to all these applications to enhance privacy. Speaking of which, select “Privacy and safety” and scroll down to the “Data sharing and personalization” section. From here, you can disable personalized ads, prevent your in-app activity from being tracked by said advertisers, restrict your data from being shared by third parties, safeguard your location information from being used as a part of X’s data analytics, and stop Grok from getting trained on your data.

Go to the “Account” tab in Uber and select “Settings.” You’ll see a “Privacy” section here that provides all the options you need to turn off personalized ads and marketing efforts that use your data to craft tailor-made offers. This applies to Uber Eats as well and helps you take a substantial step to stop Uber from tracking your activity. You can also adjust how location tracking works, though the options are somewhat limited because your location data is critical to Uber’s services.

Once this is done, tap “Manage your Google account.” Go to “Third-party apps and services” to monitor any application connected to your ID and delete any connections if you don’t want your privacy to be compromised. However, the biggest impact will be in the “Data and privacy” section, where you can turn off several options to prevent Google from accessing your data and engaging in invasive practices. Along with the “Personalize Search” and “My Ad Center” tabs we’ve already discussed, you can also turn off options to prevent personalized Google Play recommendations from appearing. Additionally, “Web & App Activity,” “Google Play History,” “YouTube History,” and “Timeline” are sections where you should ideally turn off everything to enhance data privacy.

Given this spotty history, you’d better turn off Spotify’s invasive data-tracking practices. Tap your profile picture in the app to open the menu, which includes the “Settings and privacy” tab. Go to “Privacy and social” and scroll all the way down to uncover a clickable link that redirects you to the “Account Privacy” page on a separate webpage. From here, you can disable options to prevent your data from being used for tailored ads. You can also download any data collected by Spotify to gain more transparency into the information this company tracks. Your account data can be prepared and downloaded within 5 days, while your streaming history and technical log information will take about a month to prepare and download.

To take things a step further, tap your profile picture to open your account page, where a gear icon at the top right lets you access these settings. From here, tap on “Permissions” under the “Additional services” section, and you’ll see a list of permissions. Tapping one of these options opens the app permissions page, where you can turn off location sharing and anything else that doesn’t sit right with you.

Once done, go back to the Settings page and check out “Privacy controls.” Here you’ll find options to give you greater control over the personal data fed into this platform. “My Data” lets you download all the data collected by this platform to see exactly what is being harvested on your end. You can also prevent your Snaps and videos from training Snapchat’s generative AI tools in “Generative AI Settings,” while also deleting any previously accumulated data in the fittingly-named “Delete My AI data” section.

Secure your data on TikTok by going to the app’s privacy settings and clearing it. On the same note, make sure you’re not voluntarily providing anything other than what’s required on the personal information front to this app. If you want to go the extra mile to prevent your activity from being tracked, you can even use a VPN to run TikTok with it enabled. Please consider a paid VPN service instead of a free one.