There are apps that may be exchanging more data than necessary with their servers, perhaps with the aim of creating a commercial profile about us to monetize later. You should check these connections on your mobile to make sure there are no strange things going on.
We know that it’s normal for apps to connect to the Internet on their own from time to time, even if we’re not using them. All kinds of apps, from social networks to maps and news apps, will connect to servers on their own to download information, update themselves, and always have a new feed ready, or have the program ready to start using quickly. However, the more often they connect, the more likely they are to be exchanging data about you with the servers (location, usage, etc.). If we’re not actively using them, we’ll raise our eyebrows and rightly suspect that an app is exchanging too much data with another computer.
This is what has struck a security expert as very striking, who has told Cybernews how strange and worrying it is that applications such as Facebook, Instagram, X, Google, YouTube, Messenger, Google Photos or even Duolingo are connecting so many times to different domains every day. This implies one thing: the tracking that these apps do of our data is even worse than we could imagine. An iPhone can make up to 3308 DNS queries in one day, compared to 2323 on an Android. Some of these requests, especially on Android, were sent to servers located in countries with geopolitical conflict, such as Russia or China, according to the aforementioned media.
All of this made me quite curious when I read it, and it made me want to check this data for myself on my phone. It turns out that I didn’t have the ‘App Privacy Report’ activated on my iPhone. Now I have it activated and I’ll wait to see if I find any apps that, despite not using them almost ever, are recording too much Internet activity. On iPhone you can find this setting by going to Settings and typing in the search bar “report”. Select “App Privacy Report«, and check or enable it to see if there is anything strange. You should be able to see a list of apps sorted by the number of times they have connected to domains, similar to the image below.
The thing is, the number shown in that list doesn’t even really indicate how many times the information has been transferred. That number only reflects how many times the app has renewed its connection to the DNS (Domain Name System), which it has to do every few minutes, between 5 and 10, when the so-called time to live (TTL) runs out. But, during this time, the app has been able to call the API as many times as it has time to. That is, if an app has made 10 requests to the DNS, it could have accessed the corresponding server up to 100 times in that time.
Check this data on your mobile
That’s why it’s a good idea to check this section on your iPhone from time to time, or similar features on Android, such as the Privacy Panel or Permission Management. Obviously, when it comes to apps that you use often, such as Instagram, it’s not unusual to see a lot of activity. However, when we notice that the figure is high for apps that we don’t even have open often, it would be time to consider taking action.
Apple explains it like this: “An app can contact a domain, among other things, to send an email, stream video in real time, offer game content, or connect to other devices to, for example, make a video call,” they explain. In other words, it is normal for these connections to occur, but it must be taken into account that the greater the daily number, the more likely it is that this app is exchanging data about our device, which may not be in our interest if we want to safeguard privacy.
Using an ad blocker, VPN, or DNS filter can be one way to limit these information exchanges.
