- Nearly half of the top mobile apps collect your browsing history
- Social media apps are the worst offenders
- Avoiding in-app browsers can limit data collection
You probably assume your web browser is the only app keeping tabs on where you go online. According to new research from Surfshark, that assumption is incorrect.
The cybersecurity firm analyzed 40 of the most popular Android and iOS apps and found that 18 of them, or 45%, report collecting users' browsing history in their app store privacy labels. In other words, nearly half of the apps you open every day may be logging the websites you visit.
Even the best VPN cannot fully stop an app from recording what you do inside its own walls, which makes understanding what you are signing up for more important than ever.
What Surfshark found
Surfshark's team looked at 40 leading apps split evenly across four categories: generative AI, social media, e-commerce, and messaging.
For each one, the researchers checked whether its Apple App Store label reported collecting "Browsing History" and whether its Google Play label reported "Web Browsing History."
Social media came out as the biggest collector by far. Nine of the 10 social apps studied collect browsing history on at least one platform. Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, X, YouTube, and Pinterest do so on both Android and iOS, while Reddit, LinkedIn, and Snapchat collect it on Android only. Discord was the only social app that collected it on neither.
E-commerce came next, with half of the shopping apps analyzed collecting the data on at least one platform.
Messaging was less hungry, with only Rakuten Viber, Messenger, and LINE gathering it, echoing earlier findings on how much data messaging apps collect.
In the generative AI category, Google Gemini was the only app of the 10 to report collecting browsing history.
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Why apps want your browsing history
The logic is straightforward: the more an app knows about where you go online, the more precisely it can target ads and shape the content in your feed.
As Surfshark's lead system engineer Karolis Kaciulis explains, many apps now route external links through their own "embedded browsers," so the moment you tap a link, they can track what you search for and look at.
The important thing to remember here is that most of these social media and shopping apps do not need your browsing history to provide their services. The practice is not related to providing value to users, and simply takes place to benefit the app companies.
Kaciulis argues that consent for this is usually buried in the fine print, and that the apps fighting hardest to keep you inside their own browser tend to be the ones selling ads rather than the ones that need your history to function.
How to stay safe
There is no single switch that turns all of this off, but a few habits can go a long way.
The easiest is to sidestep in-app browsers: when you tap a link, use the "Open in default browser" option or paste the URL into your default browser, which stops the host app from watching where you go next.
Pair this with switching to a privacy-focused browser, and you'll be able to avoid a lot of the worst data-collecting practices without much effort.
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