According to a study posted recently, taking a detailed look on how the applications that are being used in school are responsible for sharing students data with other third parties. The research showed that the data transmitted by majority of the school apps is found to be 8 times more susceptible to get shared by Android with third parties that could be a very high risk. In comparison with Android, iOS devices are not responsible for sharing such data.
This new study was carried out and published by Me2B Alliance, a non profit organization aiming for the goal of fostering and giving a respectful treatment to people with technology. The study was done with a random selection of 73 different mobile applications that were used by up to 38 schools. This covered almost half a million people including students, their educators their families.
The big picture hosting both tech giants, iOS and Android, Me2B revealed that out of 10 school application, 6 of them would send the user student data to other third parties with an average of 10.6 third party data channels receiving data from each app. According to the non profit organization, the analysis that was performed showed that the majority of the school apps (60% of them) were responsible for sending the user data with a variety of third parties. These third parties that were receiving the data included major advertising platforms holding two big names, Google and Facebook. Almost half of the shared data (49%) was being shared by Google while 14% of it was received by Facebook.
Getting things in more depth showed that Android devices were responsible for sharing the most data as compared to iOS devices. Almost 91% of the applications available on Android were sending data to some high risk parties while only 26% apps available on iOS were responsible for this. Not only this, but in comparison with 2.6% of iOS apps, 20% of the Android based applications were busy in sharing data with very high risk third parties.
According to Me2B, the App Tracking Transparency feature of Apple supposed to be launching with iOS 14.5 is expected to lower the building of a profile on Apple devices by these third parties, however it is also believed that even after introducing the ATT feature, iOS may still not be able to fully aside itself from the profile building risk. One rising concern is that according to the researchers, an upward of 95% of the overall third parties data channels gets activated even if the user is not logged in. Based on this, the report questioned both Apple and Google to detail the users how the sharing of data with third parties actually works.
Read next: 6 in 10 Consumers Rely on their Memory for Effective Password Management (Concerning)
This new study was carried out and published by Me2B Alliance, a non profit organization aiming for the goal of fostering and giving a respectful treatment to people with technology. The study was done with a random selection of 73 different mobile applications that were used by up to 38 schools. This covered almost half a million people including students, their educators their families.
The big picture hosting both tech giants, iOS and Android, Me2B revealed that out of 10 school application, 6 of them would send the user student data to other third parties with an average of 10.6 third party data channels receiving data from each app. According to the non profit organization, the analysis that was performed showed that the majority of the school apps (60% of them) were responsible for sending the user data with a variety of third parties. These third parties that were receiving the data included major advertising platforms holding two big names, Google and Facebook. Almost half of the shared data (49%) was being shared by Google while 14% of it was received by Facebook.
Getting things in more depth showed that Android devices were responsible for sharing the most data as compared to iOS devices. Almost 91% of the applications available on Android were sending data to some high risk parties while only 26% apps available on iOS were responsible for this. Not only this, but in comparison with 2.6% of iOS apps, 20% of the Android based applications were busy in sharing data with very high risk third parties.
According to Me2B, the App Tracking Transparency feature of Apple supposed to be launching with iOS 14.5 is expected to lower the building of a profile on Apple devices by these third parties, however it is also believed that even after introducing the ATT feature, iOS may still not be able to fully aside itself from the profile building risk. One rising concern is that according to the researchers, an upward of 95% of the overall third parties data channels gets activated even if the user is not logged in. Based on this, the report questioned both Apple and Google to detail the users how the sharing of data with third parties actually works.
Read next: 6 in 10 Consumers Rely on their Memory for Effective Password Management (Concerning)
