"Disaster Apps Share Personal Data in Violation of Their Privacy Policies"
Madelyn Sanfilippo, a professor in the School of Information Sciences at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and a team of experts examined 15 popular disaster apps. These apps fell into five categories: government agency apps, general weather apps, third-party apps operated by government partners, third-party apps misrepresented as government apps, and third-party apps specific to certain types of emergencies such as hurricanes. They tracked the personal data sent by these apps and examined if they followed government regulations and their own privacy policies. It was discovered that many of the apps are incompliant with their own privacy policies. According to the researchers, many of them capture location data by default when opened and do not specify the third parties that may access personal data. This article continues to discuss findings from the study surrounding the violation of privacy policies by disaster apps.