You Give Apps Sensitive Personal Information. Then They Tell Facebook.

Millions of smartphone users confess their most intimate secrets to apps, including when they want to work on their belly fat or the price of the house they checked out last weekend. Unbeknown to most people, in many cases that data is being shared with someone else: Facebook. The social-media giant collects intensely personal information from many popular smartphone apps just seconds after users enter it, even if the user has no connection to Facebook. The apps often send the data without any prominent or specific disclosure. Previously unreported is how at least 11 popular apps, totaling tens of millions of downloads, have also been sharing sensitive data entered by users. Facebook software collects data from many apps even if no Facebook account is used to log in and if the end user isn’t a Facebook member. Apple and Alphabet’s Google, which operate the two dominant app stores, don’t require apps to disclose all the partners with whom data is shared