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Privacy | The personal data Strava, Nike and other apps hold

Sometimes apps simply need to know personal stuff about you in order to provide the insights and guidance you downloaded them for in the first place. However, other apps are just lazy and ask for carte-blanche access to everything. If you’ve read any news recently, it won’t have escaped your notice that PRIVACY is becoming an ever-more important topic.

Some of us think we are clever and secure with our data. Others don’t care and others REALLY care…a lot. The last of those 3 categories appear to have ‘won’ and the world of apps and websites are now having to, at least, pay lip service to issues around consent and clarity when holding your data.

Fair enough. Of course, one of the biggest security risks is that you use that same password across multiple sites and that’s your respossibility as no site is truly hack-proof.

However, introducing mechanisms to manage data privacy can be time-consuming for the content provider and that creates a big barrier-to-entry for startups. For the likes of Google, sure it costs them the money to run a small department but they can afford that whereas if you are a one-person startup app then YOU have to find the time (or money) to do all the compliance work.

Of course, then there are the lazy people (me!) who just click on ‘YES you can write all the cookies about me you want to’ – many sites bank on people like me being regular visitors.

Anyway, mini-rant over, this image shows some research from USwitch detailing what some popular iOS apps and Apple Watch 6 apps like STRAVA and Nike Run Club would like from you in terms of your personal data.

I produced a larger table of sports app recently and the USwitch table certainly needs beefing up a bit, but it’s indicative of the wider picture.

These apps have different purposes and so need different pieces of information, so I’m not sure that the table really gives insights. I’d much rather know which of them have had data breaches that compromised either my password, address or credit card details.  Which brings us to one omission from the list…Garmin, who was famously hacked in 2020.

Strava: Set you STRAVA Privacy Zone