Bible Gateway
Using a prayer or scripture app tells the company your faith, and one policy says outright that it collects your religion by inference. The location it needs for prayer times or a nearby place of worship also feeds ads and analytics. Your giving and your activity go back to your congregation.
Reported incidents
App users' data fed into a News Corp ad targeting system since 2017
2022-01-24Affected Bible Gateway app and the NewsIQ ad targeting system
BuzzFeed News reported on 24 January 2022 that Bible Gateway, one of the largest devotional apps and owned by News Corp, had since 2017 fed data about the nearly 8 million people who downloaded its app into NewsIQ, an ad targeting system that infers users' interests from their behaviour across News Corp's apps and websites. BuzzFeed quoted NewsIQ's claim that it can "capture the preferences, opinions and emotions" of users for advertisers. Bible Gateway and News Corp declined to list which preferences, opinions and emotions NewsIQ captures, saying personal data collected by Bible Gateway "is permissioned and used in compliance with applicable data privacy laws."
People affected typically ask Bible Gateway to confirm whether their information was included, and which categories.
The verified route
DÆTRAX is a personal data accountability ledger: a dated record of which companies hold your personal data, what you asked them to do about it, and what they claimed in reply.