You Give Apps Sensitive Personal Information Then They Tell Facebook

Sam Schechner and Mark Secada writing for The Wall Street Journal

In the Journal’s testing, Instant Heart Rate: HR Monitor, the most popular heart-rate app on Apple’s iOS, made by California-based Azumio Inc., sent a user’s heart rate to Facebook immediately after it was recorded.

Flo Health Inc.’s Flo Period & Ovulation Tracker, which claims 25 million active users, told Facebook when a user was having her period or informed the app of an intention to get pregnant, the tests showed.

Real-estate app Realtor.com, owned by Move Inc., a subsidiary of Wall Street Journal parent News Corp, sent the social network the location and price of listings that a user viewed, noting which ones were marked as favorites, the tests showed.

One thing the article didn’t doesn’t explain is, what do the apps get out of this? Do they get paid by Facebook for each piece of data they send? If not, why do they do it? Is it just negligence about what the SDK is doing?