Cape Argus E-dition

For some recipe apps, your personal data is gravy

TATUM HUNTER

PAPER-and-ink cookbooks come with a few advantages compared to recipe apps: extra information about origins and ingredients, and not having to incorporate your beeping phone into any good-for-the-soul cooking time, says cookbook author and critic Paula Forbes.

There’s also a third benefit: analogue cookbooks aren’t sending streams of information about you to third-party advertisers.

A report from Mozilla Foundation, creator of the “Privacy Not Included” holiday shopping guide report, found personal data streaming out of popular Android recipe apps, including precise location, detailed device information and scrolling and tapping behaviour.

Allrecipes Dinner Spinner, Recipes Home, Easy Recipes and Shopping List and Food Network Kitchen were the worst offenders in terms of the number of data requests from advertisers, according to the report.

It's the latest example of the constant, behind-the-scenes monitoring that powers many of the apps we know and love. App-makers give your data to ad companies, which then combine that information with your activity on totally separate apps to target you with better ads.

Apple launched a privacy feature in April that prompts you to ask apps not to track you, though some apps may be ignoring those preferences.

Google, which owns Android, says the operating system is rolling out a similar feature throughout the next year, but once it arrives, Android device owners will have to track down the setting rather than getting a pop up. Google is also introducing a data safety section in the Google Play app store in February, which will list each app’s notable privacy practices as well as what categories of data it collects.

As of now, however, developers aren’t required to disclose which thirdparty companies they're sharing that data with.

Discovery, which owns the Food Network Kitchen app, said that by using the app, people agree to its privacy policy. Position Mobile, which owns Recipes Home, said that its data collection practices are consistent with its privacy policy, Google's rules and standard ad industry practices, and the privacy features available to Android users allow them to control how much information they want to share. Meredith Corporation, which owns Allrecipes, said it takes its privacy obligations seriously.

“Recipes seem, on the surface, so benign,” said Forbes, who was busy testing recipes for a new cookbook. “It’s a little upsetting if they’re not.”

The most egregious tracking came from Recipes Home, according to Becca Ricks, the Mozilla researcher behind the report. She observed several different trackers, including Google and Facebook, collecting data from the app. Some advertisers collected her phone’s battery level, whether it was charging and whether headphones were plugged in, she said. One tracker repeatedly asked the app for data on how long people look at different ads.

Facebook didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. |

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2021-11-28T08:00:00.0000000Z

2021-11-28T08:00:00.0000000Z

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