Social Media Applications’ Privacy Policies for Facilitating Digital Living

Mobile devices are widely utilised over the globe to connect people with their loves, social interactions, or business. The mobile devices are rapidly increasing, creating business opportunities for third-party applications developers. Unfortunately, the increase of third-party applications also creates an increase security and privacy issues. Mobile applications privacy policies ensure that one or users of the applications understand how their personal information is collected by the developer of that mobile app. Acceptable usage policies outline those actions which are not allowed or allowed when using the application. Some acceptable usage policies contain disclaimers of liability for the mobile application developer. This paper compares privacy policies of four popular mobile applications and assess their acceptable usage within the context of third-party applications on mobile users. The primary data was collected through questionnaires that gather the understanding and perception of people regarding third-party policy. The secondary data collection was used for comparing the third-party application’s policies. The results show that most people disregard policies and they do not understand the policies. Furthermore, all the four third-party applications use both the API and cookies features. The privacy policies API feature in this case is used to allow the third-party companies to access various features like user data and posting functionality. With policy that these third-part companies are using, and the increase in the usage of smartphone third-party applications for mobile users’ daily interactions with third-party applications; then there is a need for recommending ways of safeguarding the mobile device users.