The Christmas season is all about being with family and having fun. Yet, while classic board games get replaced by their online counterparts, your online privacy is increasingly at risk – not the best way to start the new year!
For instance, five of the most popular holiday-themed gaming apps are specifically Christmas-related. Worse still, free festive apps are especially data-hungry, reportedly sharing five times more data with third parties than their paid version.
These are some of the worrying findings from new research conducted by Surfshark, one of the best VPN providers on the market. Keep reading as I explain everything you need to know to stay safe.
Christmas online gaming: how much data collect?
To determine the real price we pay to enjoy festive apps, the Surfshark team analyzed the 21 most popular mobile game applications on the UK App Store across the Board Games, Family Games, and Christmas lists.
These included games, but also countdowns (Santa Tracker, Christmas Countdown!), photo editing (ElfYourself), festive music (Christmas Radio+), and gift-shopping aids (Gifster).
The App Store provides a list of 35 unique data points categorized into 16 unique data point categories. The experts analyzed the data set according to the number, type, and handling of the data points collected by each app. Needless to say, the team found most of these apps to be pretty data-hungry.
Make sure to delete all the festive apps you've downloaded after the holidays are up
While the average number of unique data points collected by the most popular festive apps is seven, some gather as many as 13 out of 35.
The digital adaptation of the famous board game, Monopoli Go! tops the list of data-hungry apps with 13 unique data points collected. All of them are data linked to you, while 10 are actively used for online tracking. This means the app shares your details, including your location, with data brokers or other third parties to build your profile across different websites for targeted advertising.
The third most popular free board game app, Hexa Sort, shows a similar behavior, collecting 13 unique data points, 10 of which are tracked, including location and purchase history. Bubble Pop!, and ElfYourself are also among the most data-hungry apps.
As expected, free apps collect and share the most data, and experts found that Christmas freebies share five times more data with third parties than paid apps.
As Tomas Stamulis, Chief Security Officer at Surfshark, explains, mobile app developers are increasingly taking regulations and data protection requirements into account.
In the past, gaming apps often requested broad access to your data, while today's developers are more likely to focus on information that is truly necessary for the software to function properly.
Yet, Surfshark's research nonetheless shows how free applications consistently put your privacy at risk by sharing significantly more data with third parties compared to paid apps. This, according to Stamulis, highlights the importance of evaluating privacy implications.
He said: "A responsible approach to data protection might encourage users to opt for paid versions of apps, look for alternative apps, or consider whether the app can function without granting permissions that may not be truly necessary. If such options aren’t provided, it raises important questions about the intent behind the data collection."
Another crucial thing to keep in mind is the aftermath of the Christmas season. The likes of Christmas Countdown!, Santa Tracker, and Christmas Radio+ could track and share your location data with third parties, for example, even when you're not using the app anymore. As a rule of thumb, you should delete all the festive apps you've downloaded after the holidays are over.
While security software like virtual private network (VPN) and ad-blocker services can only boost your privacy a little – by, for instance, masking your real IP address location and protecting your device from malware – they cannot prevent the applications from tracking you. However, you could use a data removal service like Incogni afterward to ask data brokers to delete all the details they have on you.
