Fitness Apps Get You Healthy—as They Hoover up Your Personal Data

It's always interesting to see which services are gathering the most of our personal data. We've done it before, looking at the major social networks (We found that Facebook gathers the most, hands down.) But your phone is filled with apps for services that purport to have only your best interests at heart: fitness apps. How much of your personal information do they need to make you a better you?

Apparently, a lot. The folks at Supplement Timing researched what kinds of data fitness apps are gathering, both by default (you can't use the app without providing it) and optionally (sometimes you hand over more data for more feedback). They cobbled together an exhaustive list of apps and services and then checked all their privacy policies and user agreements. They found 27 types of data. Each app was assigned points based on what they collect—2 points for default data, 1 point for optional. The total was a score where the highest number indicates the most data collected.

As you can see above, the biggest offender is a women's health and fertility app called Maven, with a score of 31. Yet it had even fewer default data types than the second-place app, PlateJoy.

Those top 13 apps we show above are only the tip of the data-sucking-app iceberg. The full chart has a full 108 apps on it.

Here's an animation to show the most and least data-hungry apps in each of the 10 categories Supplement Timing identified across the 108 apps.

LEAST AND MOST DATA HUNGRY APPS BY CATEGORY

Other big names in the list per category that you don't see in the top 13 at the top include Down Dog (yoga app) and Calm (sleeping and mental health app).

Note that the app at the bottom of the list—the one that asks for the least personal info—is WorryWatch, a mental health app. It literally wants only one data point from you: some device information it gets via the app store. That is consistently the only default data required by all 108 apps.

None of this takes away from what may be very effective apps for helping you track health data or get motivated, but if you have privacy concerns, these charts can certainly help you navigate to the apps that really put health first. After all, as they note in the conclusion, "If app data is misused or misplaced, it could compromise your employability and health insurance." Also, some app developers may have a political agenda you don't agree with.

Check out the full report at Supplement Timing. It includes the interactive, searchable, reorderable table below, as well as charts for each of the 10 categories.

About Our Expert

Eric Griffith

Senior Editor, Features

My Experience

I've been writing about computers, the internet, and technology professionally since 1992, more than half of that time with PCMag. I arrived at the end of the print era of PC Magazine as a senior writer. I served for a time as managing editor of business coverage before settling back into the features team for the last decade and a half. I write features on all tech topics, plus I handle several special projects, including the Readers' Choice and Business Choice surveys and yearly coverage of the Best ISPs and Best Gaming ISPs, Best Products of the Year, and Best Brands (plus the Best Brands for Tech Support, Longevity, and Reliability).

I started in tech publishing right out of college, writing and editing stories about hardware and development tools. I migrated to software and hardware coverage for families, and I spent several years exclusively writing about the then-burgeoning technology called Wi-Fi. I was on the founding staff of several magazines, including Windows Sources, FamilyPC, and Access Internet Magazine. All of which are now defunct, and it's not my fault. I have freelanced for publications as diverse as Sony Style, Playboy.com, and Flux. I got my degree at Ithaca College in, of all things, television/radio. But I minored in writing so I'd have a future.

In my long-lost free time, I wrote some novels, a couple of which are not just on my hard drive: BETA TEST ("an unusually lighthearted apocalyptic tale," according to Publishers' Weekly) and a YA book called KALI: THE GHOSTING OF SEPULCHER BAY. Go get them on Kindle.

I work from my home in Ithaca, NY, and did it long before pandemics made it cool.

The Technology I Use

My first computer was a Laser 128, an Apple II-compatible clone with an integrated keyboard, matched with an eye-straining monochrome green monitor. I used it to type papers in college for other people for money...until I discovered the Mac SE in the college computer room. That changed my life. My first cellphone was a Samsung Uproar—the silver one with the built-in MP3 player from the Napster days (the pre-iPod era).

I use an iPhone 15 Pro hourly and an iPad Air infrequently (but I'm always in the market for a cheap Android tablet). I have a PlayStation 5 just to play Spider-Man, and several Windows machines, including a work-issued Lenovo ThinkPad. I talk to Alexa and Siri all day long. I do the majority of my computing on a 15-inch LG Gram laptop attached to a Thunderbolt hub to run a multi-monitor setup—I overdid it on the power needed to simply work from home.

I'm most at home in Microsoft Word after decades of writing there. More and more, I turn to services like Google Docs, using tools like Grammarly. I use Google's Chrome browser due to an addiction to several extensions I think I can't live without, but probably could. I use Excel extensively on data-intensive stories, but for chart creation, we've switched over entirely to using Infogram for interactive features that are hard to find elsewhere. I do a lot of graphics work for my stories, but limit myself to the free and amazing Paint.NET software to edit images.

I'm a firm evangelist for using the cloud for backup and syncing of files; I'm primarily using Dropbox, which has never failed me, but I also have redundant setups on Microsoft OneDrive, plus extra picture backups on Amazon Photos and iCloud. Why take chances? For entertainment, mine is a streaming-only household—my kid has never seen network TV and barely been exposed to commercials, thanks to Roku and Amazon Music. The house is peppered with smart speakers from Amazon for instant gratification and control of smart home devices like multiple Wyze cameras and Nest Protect smoke detectors. I've got accounts on all the major social networks, to my horror. I have a robot vacuum for each floor of the house. I want a 3D printer, but not sure what I'd use it for.

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