Beware, 80% of the most popular fitness apps are selling out your privacy
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Strava and Fitbit are the most hungry for your personal data. When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works. About 12 out of 15 of the best fitness apps actively share your personal data with third parties, de-facto selling out your privacy. Among these, Strava and Fitbit are the most data-hungry, collecting 84% of all potential data points.
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These are some of the worrying findings from new research released by Surfshark, one of the best VPN services on the market, after looking at data collection and sharing practices of the most popular fitness mobile applications. "Our research shows that free apps share significantly more data with third parties compared to paid apps, highlighting the importance of evaluating privacy implications," said Tomas Stamulis, Chief Security Officer at Surfshark.
To determine the real price of (often free) at-home training, the Surfshark team analyzed the 15 top fitness mobile applications around. These include exercise trackers, workout apps, and personal training platforms. Experts sourced the data collection information for each app from its Apple App Store page on December 30, 2024. The App Store provides a list of 35 unique data points categorized into 16 unique data point categories. The team looked at the data set according to the number, type, and handling of the data points collected by each app.
Surfshark unveiled a pretty worrying scenario for mobile fitness fanatics. As mentioned earlier, 80% of the analyzed apps share users' tracked data with third parties. These details include device locations, emails, user IDs, device IDs, or profiles. Nike Training Club leads the category, with four types of tracking data shared with third parties. These are coarse location (approximate, generally within a city block), some sensitive info, device ID, and product interaction.
