A CYBERSECURITY expert is warning anyone with the Gmail app to delete it from their iPhone immediately as it's been dubbed a "privacy nightmare."
Zak Doffman, a cybersecurity contributor for Forbes, has warned about Gmail's "alarming privacy labels" and urged users of the app to remove it from their phones.
Doffman urged that a recent Apple update should push cellphone users to delete the Gmail app.
He also slammed Google's Gmail as "a privacy nightmare compared to Apple’s alternative."
Doffman explained via Forbes: "Earlier this year, Google cleverly allowed Facebook to play the role of minesweeper when Apple’s privacy labels exposed the sheer extent of the previously invisible data harvesting taking place.
"Google let its own iOS apps run stale, delaying updates until the furor had settled, before showing that its own apps were no better.
"And so, one by one, we saw Google’s flagship iOS apps – Gmail, Maps, Photos, Chrome, YouTube, Docs – fill in the alarming blanks.
"And because this is Google, it was suddenly very important to remember that there’s an account-based system linking all these apps together and a spider’s web of trackers following users around."
To further prove his point, the Forbes contributor shared DuckDuckGo's warning about how "Google’s trackers are installed on 75 percent of the top million websites."
The warning continued: "Google sells ads not only on their search engine, but also on over 2.2 million other websites and over 1 million apps.
"Every time you visit one of these sites or apps, Google is storing that information and using it to target ads at you."
Doffman said 70 percent of emails in a person's inbox are "laced with secretive trackers that send information back to their handlers," which ultimately is utilized in the "algorithms that manipulate what you buy, think and do."
His warning comes about a week after Google spread the word about a "zero-day" security flaw in Chrome and urged users to update their browser now.
Meanwhile, experts are warning that downloading too many apps to your phone can leave your privacy at risk and your personal information vulnerable.
Facebook and Google-owned apps can access data from your location to browsing history while others collect information from your phone even when they are not being used.
Many of the apps in question can be used through an internet browser, privacy specialists advise, meaning that they do not need to be downloaded directly to your device.
By downloading them to your phone instead, users are forced to accept privacy and data terms and conditions that may leave their information at risk.
“Use a privacy-protecting browser instead of downloading every app,” Leif-Nissen Lundbæk, CEO and co-founder of Xayn, told The Sun.
“You really don’t need to download everything. Do you really need all of these apps?
“A variety of apps even when you don’t use them, they are damaging. A lot of apps are pretty bad.”
Lundbæk said that it is hard to “prevent everything” but urged people to be more mindful of what they download to their phone and to only install those apps they feel they can’t go without.
“What do you use daily? Download those,” he said.
“For everything else, you can use a browser. It offers a certain level of protection, especially if you combine that with a VPN.”
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