How to Understand the Real Price of Free Apps
Did you ever do a privacy triage for the apps you use the most? Here’s how to do it in 60 seconds
“If you’re not paying for it, you are the product”. I’m sure most of us heard this sentence since it appeared as a blog comment, back in 2010. It surely makes a whole lot of sense! And yet, over the years we’ve gotten used to the comfort of free applications and online services and use them every day, forgetting that simple statement. We are paying for free apps, and sometimes the price may actually be way too high!
Indeed, watching a targeted advertisement before a video that will teach me something useful looks worthwhile. Problem is, it’s easy to forget about the unspoken price we’re paying for every single app! I knew I had been guilty of overlooking this the moment I noticed my blue-light filter app mysteriously stopped working without internet access.
That’s when I realized I needed to draw the line somewhere, and reclaim my privacy from apps that I had let into my phone without thinking about their hidden price. Here’s how I did it.
The 60-Seconds Privacy Triage
After that blue-light filter app got me suspicious I decided to go over all the apps on my phone to see which ones looked trustworthy to me, so I outlined this 60-second triage. For all the apps you use, I suggest you also ask yourself these questions:
Is it a paid app?
If the answer to this is yes, you can breathe a sigh of relief and rest relatively assured that you know the revenue stream for this app. Of course, it is not a guarantee and there may be data collection happening in addition to the upfront payment. So you might just want to go on with the triage, just in case.
Does the service explicitly run ads?
This is quite the norm for most free services and applications. From the Big Tech companies like Google and Facebook that collect your data and sell advertisement space on their websites, all the way to the smaller apps that are loaded with those annoying banners and commercial interruptions. But still, this doesn’t worry me all that much. You know you’re paying with the time and attention you dedicate to those ads. If you’re getting enough value from the app that’s great, more power to you!
But what if there are no ads? Well, contrary to it being good news, this is exactly where you should start being concerned. But first, one last check for the optimists at heart.
Do the developers have external funding?
A free app that doesn’t run ads? That’s when my alert level starts to raise to code orange. But of course, before we run and delete our Signal and Telegram apps, we might want to look for potential external funding. As it turns out, Signal and Telegram run on donations that support the development and infrastructure maintenance. So before you trash all those payment-free, banner-free apps, it may be good to go for a quick online research round because some good-willed donors may be supporting the app! In that case, maybe consider joining them for a good cause? Granted, if the service is proving to be useful for you.
But if this app seems to sustain itself out of this air well… it may be one step away from being deleted.
Time to dig the dirt.
For this step, we might need to use heavy weapons. At this point, you should open your phone settings and look at the app permissions. Let me just be clear. A blue-light filter app does not need network access. Those apps that let you manage notifications can actually read all their content, so they better have a statement in their app store description about what they’re doing with that data.
Try to play around with permissions. Remove network access from the app and see if it still works. Read the app store manifesto to look for clues of their revenue model. Check if the battery consumption or network usage is unreasonably high for an app that reminds you to drink a glass of water.
If an app gets to the last step of the triage and you see any suspicious sign, my genuine advice would be to consider looking for a more transparent alternative. You might just have a very well-crafted, innocent-looking malware or surveillance tool under your hands.
But of course, there’s no absolute threshold for what you consider too invasive of your privacy. As long as you make a conscious decision, anything goes!
You Have the Final Say
Congratulations! You made it through the assessment of your most used applications. I hope this triage helped you raise awareness over the apps that made it inside your phone and daily life, so you can get back control over your privacy. Bonus point, maybe you have some free space on the phone now! And we always need that extra space for some more memes.
