News Blog
The issues, the events on file, the research behind them, and the cases that show it.
Case study 1 Oct 2026
You connect your bank to cut your bills. Other businesses pay for what your spending shows.
Snoop reads the bank and card accounts its users connect, and its policy lets it give their spending data to other companies to build advertising audiences. Since 2023 it has belonged to a bank, and it shares data with that bank for "credit or savings behavioural analysis".
Case study · 2015 to 2026 · Finance & Banking
More case studies
What happened when people asked, and what the studies found.
Case study 1 Oct 2026
You report a match. Someone else's staff reads it.
Dating apps send reports, with the messages and photos in them, to outside moderators and software. The firm that moderated Grindr now belongs to an AI company whose contract makes de-identified client data its own.
Case study · 2023 to 2026 · Dating & Matrimony
Case study 30 Sept 2026
A Catholic group bought app data to find priests who used Grindr
Phone data with no names on it, showing which devices used Grindr and where they went, was on sale through brokers. A Catholic group in Denver bought it, matched phones to parishes and seminaries, and passed what it found to bishops.
Case study · 2018 to 2023 · Faith & Religion · Dating & Matrimony
Case study 30 Sept 2026
A church marketing firm predicted who might be depressed, divorcing or addicted
Gloo told churches it could predict who might have a marriage in trouble, depression or a drug addiction, from data it bought about Americans. After The Wall Street Journal asked, it stopped using mental health data and its main data supplier left.
Case study · 2021 · Faith & Religion
Case study 30 Sept 2026
A prayer app sent users' locations to a broker that sold to military contractors
Muslim Pro uses your location to set prayer times and the direction of Mecca. In 2020 it was also sending that location to a data broker whose customers included US defence contractors.
Case study · 2020 to 2025 · Faith & Religion
Case study 30 Sept 2026
A prayer app took users' phonebooks and left them in open storage
Pray.com uploaded the contact lists of users who let it, so it held people who had never used it. In 2020 researchers found those lists open to anyone, beside church member lists and donation records.
Case study · 2019 to 2026 · Faith & Religion
Case study 30 Sept 2026
People who asked for a free e-book are rented out by the thousand
A free money guide, a free webinar and a seminar ticket all collect a name and an email. Lists of the people who took them are rented to the next seller, and the cards that sell them say so.
Case study · 2020 to 2026 · Make-Money Courses & Coaching · Advertising & Marketing
Case study 30 Sept 2026
Phones seen inside Catholic churches were used to find voters
A political group bought location data that came from ordinary phone apps, drew a line around Catholic churches, and sent ads to the people whose phones had been inside. The churches did not know.
Case study · 2018 to 2020 · Faith & Religion
Case study 24 Sept 2026
Ashley Madison charged people to be deleted, and kept the rest
The affair site charged a fee for a full delete and kept deactivated accounts indefinitely. Then it was breached, and 36 million accounts were exposed.
Case study · 2015 to 2016 · Dating & Matrimony · Adult Entertainment
Case study 24 Sept 2026
He asked Amazon for his data and was sent a stranger's 1,700 recordings
A German customer made an access request in 2018. The link Amazon sent him held 1,700 voice recordings from someone else's home.
Case study · 2018 · E-commerce · Technology
Case study 24 Sept 2026
He asked Facebook for his data and got 1,222 pages
A law student in Vienna used his right of access in 2011. The file that came back held three years of his life on the site, including messages he had deleted.
Case study · 2011 · Social Media
Case study 24 Sept 2026
Parents deleted their children's Alexa recordings. The transcripts stayed.
In 2023 the FTC and the US Justice Department charged that Amazon kept children's voice recordings indefinitely and undermined parents' deletion requests. Amazon agreed to a $25 million penalty.
Case study · 2023 · Technology · E-commerce
Case study 24 Sept 2026
Searcher No. 4417749
In 2006 AOL published 20 million search queries with the names swapped for numbers. Within days, reporters found the woman behind one of them.
Case study · 2006 · Technology · News & Media
Case study 24 Sept 2026
She asked Tinder for her data and got 800 pages
A journalist used her right of access in 2017. The file listed her likes, her photos, the men she was interested in, and when and where every conversation with a match happened.
Case study · 2017 · Dating & Matrimony
Case study 24 Sept 2026
The schoolwork that tracked children
In 2022 Human Rights Watch examined 164 education products that governments endorsed for remote learning. Most of them could monitor children, and many sent their data to advertising companies.
Case study · 2022 · Education · E-learning & Online Courses · Advertising & Marketing
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