Definition:

Health and medical data, which includes data from any user provided health or medical data. This also contains fitness and exercise data, including the Motion and Fitness API. This includes things like your device’s accelerometers, gyroscopes, pedometer, magnetometer, and barometer. This can be collected for user interactions, fitness tracking, health-related matters, and more. For example, a game might use accelerometer and gyroscope input to control on screen game behavior, which technically falls under this health category as motion data.

Potential benefits:

Having a music playlist go along with a workout. Having a third-party health tracking app track steps (like Garmin, Pokemon Go). This data normally requires permission to be collected, but please ensure it is optional within the privacy policy.

Potential consequences:

While not normally sold, data that is collected could be used against you in insurance-related schemes, as we have seen before.

Search Terms:

accelerometers, active minutes, activity tracking, Apple HealthKit, barometer, calories, device sensor data, fitness, food, Google Fit, gyroscopes, health, heart rate, magnetometer, motion, pedometer, sleep, steps, walk, water, weight

Definition:

An account’s or individual’s purchases or purchase tendencies. This data is commonly used to identify patterns and trends in your spending behavior, which is normally used for advertising purposes, whether from the service you are shopping with, or with third parties.

Potential benefits:

Buying an item or series of items consistently can lead to you getting coupons for similar items. Another way of putting it is advertising accuracy.

Potential consequences:

You may get hyper-specific ads that seem to “read your mind,” but are ultimately based on complex algorithms that track patterns in your spending behavior. The consequence is also its benefit, advertising accuracy.

Search Terms:

purchases, shopping, spending

Definition:

Payment information, such as form of payment, payment card number, or bank account number. If an app uses a payment service (like Stripe, Shopify, or Paypal), and is not collected, it does not need to be disclosed in a privacy policy. You should read the privacy policy of whatever payment service a given app or website is using to understand how they collect and protect your data as well. This category can also contain your credit score, salary, income, assets, debts, or any other financial information.

Potential benefits:

Online shopping service remembering your card information, or a subscription service that is billed every month. When a company is collecting credit information, they can use this to help track your credit score and give you recommendations based on that.

Potential consequences:

Stolen credit card information, phishing attacks, or identity theft. This is one of the most sought-after types of data in a data breach, and is certainly the most lucrative when it is stolen. This type of data collection can lead to a lot of stress that is out of your control once it is breached.

Search Terms:

assets, bank account, card number, credit score, debts, income, payment, payment service, salary

Definition:

This can be precise location, which is information that describes the location of you or your device with the same or greater resolution as latitude and longitude with three or more decimal places. Coarse location is the location of you or your device with lower resolution than a latitude and longitude with three or more decimal places, such as Approximate Location Services. For additional context, here is the scale of these decimal places:

Coarse Location:

1st decimal: ~ 6.9 mi (11.1km); A city
2nd decimal: ~ 0.5 mi (1.1km); A neighborhood

Precise Location:

3rd decimal: ~ 360 ft (110m); A building
4th decimal: ~ 36 ft (11m): A tennis court
5th decimal: ~ 3 ft (1.1m); A guitar
6th decimal: ~ 4 in (11cm): A deck of cards
7th decimal: ~ 0.5 in (1.1cm): The thickness of one AAA battery. This is how accurate iPhones are when tracking devices like AirTags.

Potential benefits:

Finding your lost AirPods, using GPS while traveling, playing location-based games like Pokemon Go.

Potential consequences:

You can be tracked down to the inch due to the volume of Apple devices in most populated areas of the USA. While precise data isn't commonly stored for long periods of time, it can be, and can be shared with data brokers, law enforcement, and potential bad actors.

Search Terms:

approximate, bluetooth, coarse, GPS, IP address, location, precise, ultra wideband

Definition:

Information such as first or last name, email address, phone number, home address, physical address, mailing address, or any other information that can be used to contact you outside an app or website. This information is considered directly identifiable.

Potential benefits:

Getting items shipped to you that you ordered using online shopping, a delivery driver contacting you in regards to a food delivery, a newsletter sent via email.

Potential consequences:

This is the number one source that scammers use to send you spam calls, texts, and emails.

Search Terms:

name, address, email, phone number, text

Definition:

A list of contacts in your phone, address book, or social graph. This would be directly identifiable information for your contacts.

Potential benefits:

Finding friends who use the same service.

Potential consequences:

You are giving out direct identifying information about your friends and family without their consent. This option has the same consequences as contact info for yourself, but it's for all your contacts instead. This allows scammers to send your friends and family spam calls, texts, and emails.

Search Terms:

address book, contacts, friends list

Definition:

This data contains anything created by you. This includes emails or text messages, including subject line, sender, recipients, and contents of the email or message; Photos or videos, audio data, such as your voice or sound recordings, gameplay content, or any content created during a customer support request. If an app or website offers private messaging between users, they have to discourse on the app store that it’s emails or text messages.

Potential benefits:

Direct messages with people in a chat app, photos being uploaded to a photo sharing platform, audio recordings being used for making music, working with customer support to resolve an issue.

Potential consequences:

User content can be used to train AI, which in turn can be used in scams that use AI to mimic your likeness to trick families into sending a scammer money.

Search Terms:

audio, capture, chat, customer support, direct message, email, gameplay, photos, recordings, text, user content, videos, voice

Definition:

Information about searches performed in the app or website.

Potential benefits:

Remembering what you searched for previously, updating a social feed based on search history. A shopping app using this data alongside purchase data to show you things that you’re more likely to buy based on your searches.

Potential consequences:

Advertising accuracy is both a pro and con to search data.

Search Terms:

search, history

Definition:

Information about content the user has viewed that is not part of the app, such as websites. This is mostly attributed to cookies, and other similar third-party tracking tools.

Potential benefits:

Remembering who you are based on the third-party tracking tools.

Potential consequences:

Access to track the sites and apps you use outside of the app or website you are on, which has been a notable privacy concern since 1996 since the cookie tool was more publicly known.

Search Terms:

cookies, browsing history, third party tracking, trackers

Definition:

This is data like your screen name, handle, account ID, assigned user ID, customer number, or other user- or account-level ID that can be used to identify a particular user or account. It can also be your device’s advertising identifier, or other device-level ID. This type of data is very common, and weirdly enough, might not be considered directly identifiable on its own, despite its name.

Potential benefits:

Customized username on a social media platform. Better security for apps that are utilizing device-based authentication.

Potential consequences:

If a username can be linked to you via other identifying information, like your name, that could have wider privacy consequences if you reuse that username across all services.

Search Terms:

account ID, advertising ID, customer number, device ID, handle, IMEI, MAC address, screen name, serial number, user name, UUID

Definition:

Ways you interact with the app or website, like app launches, taps, clicks, scrolling information, music listening data, video views, saved place in a game, video, or song, or other information about how you interact with the app or website. This also contains advertising data, such as information about the advertisements you have seen or clicked. This data can be used to make suggestions based on your behaviors within the app.

Potential benefits:

A video platform that uses an algorithm to make your feed feel more personalized based on how you use the platform.

Potential consequences:

Making the app very addictive, since they understand how and when you interact with content within that app. This is what we’ve seen with Facebook and “ragebait” content for years now. Additionally, advertising accuracy is both a pro and con.

Search Terms:

advertising, analytics, clicked, engagement, interact, likes, usage data, user interaction, viewed, views

Definition:

Racial or ethnic data, sexual orientation, pregnancy or childbirth information, disability, religious or philosophical beliefs, trade union membership, political opinion, genetic information, or biometric data.

Potential benefits:

An online insurance service having access to your medical records, a telemed doctor's office.

Potential consequences:

We have seen many data breaches after this kind of data, including the 23&Me data breach in 2023, which contained genetic information, among others.

Search Terms:

belief, biometric, childbirth, disability, ethnic, genetic, philosophical, political, pregnancy, racial, religious, sensitive information, sexual orientation, union

Definition:

Data collected for the purposes of measuring technical diagnostics related to the app. Often used to track crash logs, launch time, hang rate, or energy use.

Potential benefits:

If an app is acting up, this data is used by the developers to resolve those issues.

Potential consequences:

This can contain a lot of detailed usage data, but is not commonly stored.

Search Terms:

crash logs, diagnostics, energy use, launch time

Definition:

Any other data types not mentioned, such as data captured from the LiDAR sensor on your phone.

Potential benefits:

Use your best judgment!

Potential consequences:

Use your best judgment!

Search Terms:

Other data