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Surfshark Finds 45% of Top Mobile Apps Collect Browsing History

Surfshark finds 45% of top apps collect browsing history; social media apps lead, and in-app browsers help track users.

AI News Feed · 2026-09-10 09:26

Surfshark split the 40 apps evenly across four categories: generative artificial intelligence, social media, e-commerce, and messaging. For each app, researchers checked whether its Apple App Store label reported collecting “Browsing History” and whether its Google Play label reported “Web Browsing History.” The findings reflect what the apps report in those labels.

Social media was the largest collector. Nine of the 10 social media apps studied collect browsing history on at least one platform, according to Surfshark. Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, X, YouTube, and Pinterest do so on both Android and iOS. Reddit, LinkedIn, and Snapchat collect the data on Android only. Discord was the only social app in the group that collected it on neither platform.

E-commerce apps came next, with half of the shopping apps analyzed collecting browsing history on at least one platform. Messaging apps were less likely to collect it: only Rakuten Viber, Messenger, and LINE did so. In the generative AI category, Google Gemini was the only one of the 10 apps studied that reported collecting browsing history.

Surfshark said the reason is straightforward: the more an app knows about where a user goes online, the more precisely it can target advertising and shape content in a feed. Karolis Kaciulis, Surfshark's lead system engineer, said many apps route external links through their own embedded browsers, so when a user taps a link, the app can track what the user searches for and views.

Kaciulis said most of the social media and shopping apps that collect browsing history do not need it to provide their services. He argued that consent for the practice is usually buried in the fine print, and that apps working hardest to keep users inside their own browsers tend to be those selling ads rather than those that need browsing history to function.

There is no single setting that disables all such collection, according to the report. TechRadar said one of the easiest steps is to avoid in-app browsers: when tapping a link, use the “Open in default browser” option or paste the URL into the default browser. Using a privacy-focused browser can further reduce exposure to data-collecting practices.