Every couple years, someone reverse engineers a popular free social app, discovers it collects all the metadata it possibly can about your device and behavior, it blows up, everyone is shocked and promises to delete the app, then like 100 people do and people keep using them all.

If the app is well designed, hugely popular, and free, your intimate data is the subscription fee.

Just *assume* they collect your device specs and identifiers, installed apps, clipboard contents, behaviors (likes and dislikes, searches, in-app browsing, photo content, contacts, and geolocation if it can get around your device security enough to guess).

Unfortunately advertising and big data targeting is king. So use an OS that is up to date and notifies you on granular permissions, and threat model, threat model, threat model.

To be clear, this is really bad. We’ve allowed these companies enough data to sell detailed profiles of us to advertisers and even manipulate our emotions, and we rely on them and are addicted to them as a society.