THE PRIVACY 100: THE 100 WORST OFFENDERS FOR CONSUMER PRIVACY

LinkedIn takes the title for worst privacy company ever. Not only has it faced serious privacy lawsuits in the past over reading clipboard data from iPhone users, but their privacy policy also gives them the right to use, process, or share any of the data you publish without notifying or compensating you. Scary.

It’s not surprising that Facebook (and now Instagram) have made it on this list. Both companies store and track your personal content, including posts, comments, messages, credit card information, video calls, and other information from third party apps, camera/ microphone, camera roll, and audio recordings. They also use and sell this personal information to third parties and advertisements.

The amount of data Tinder has access to is scary, especially if you connect your social media to your dating profile. In one case, Tinder maintained at least 800 pages worth of information on a user that included information from her Facebook and Instagram accounts and the text of conversations she had with every single one of her matches on the app.

Grindr’s another dating app that’s raised concerns. It’s faced class actions for selling user data without consent. They’ve been known to share information like your sexual orientation and precise location, user tracking codes, and LGBTQ classifiers with third parties like Blaze.

Omegle is every parent’s worst nightmare. It’s been involved in numerous privacy allegations for reading user chats. It also stores your information for a minimum of 120 days, including the time your chat began, your IP address, your chat partner's IP address, and more.

YouTube was charged by the FTC for violating the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) Rule. According to data YouTube provides, it also collects a range of user data such as your location, browsing history, contacts, purchases, and more.

Messenger is technically a Facebook app, but we thought it deserved its own space on this list since it has its own share of privacy lawsuits. It’s been sued for collecting logs of user phone calls and text messages; it also collects information for third-party advertising, including purchase histories, financial information, location, contact information, user content, browsing histories, log data, sensitive information, contacts, and more.

Did you think email was secure? Think again. Google has faced privacy lawsuits by non-Gmail users, who claim that their email scanning technology violates their state privacy laws. Gmail can also analyze your emails, including the content you send and receive to “display relevant ads”.

Robinhood made the news for halting trades this year, but we’re highlighting them for privacy concerns. Not only were 2,000 Robinhood accounts hacked in Oct. 2020, with one user losing $300,000, but they also aren’t ashamed of sharing your information with third-party services. What’s worse is that they claim to not be responsible for the “privacy practices of these third parties” that they’re sharing our information with.

California plaintiffs have sued WeChat over illegal censorship and surveillance. WeChat collects your log data, personal data, and sharing data such as your profile, the lists you create, and photos, videos and voice recordings as accessed with your prior consent through your device’s camera and/or microphone sensor.

Samsung’s smart home ecosystem sounds cool, but it’s faced a privacy lawsuit alleging that their SmartTVs can listen to and collect audio recordings from consumers. It also appears to collects different types of data from people who own its phones and then generates extra revenue by selling that data to third parties — or sometimes using the data to power its own self-run ad network.