Avast Blog_Tips & Advices: Food delivery apps are hotter than ever — what do they tra

[harlan4096]

Should you care that these much-loved food delivery apps gather the data that they do?

Even if you weren’t super into takeout before the pandemic, chances are you’ve upped your delivery in the past year. I get it! Cooking gets tedious and boring and we’ve all needed to — literally — spice up our lives while homebound. I know that in my household, takeout has become a much more regular occurrence than I’d probably occur.

But whatever. We all deserve to give ourselves and others some grace right now. But should we be giving food delivery apps grace, too? For this week’s What Does the Internet Know About Me?, I’m going to take a look at DoorDash and GrubHub/Seamless, two of the bigger food delivery app services here in the US. (GrubHub owns Seamless, so I’m batching them together.) I already know that they know I love Chinese food. Let’s see what else they’ve got.

What does DoorDash track? What does GrubHub track?

Both delivery services collect a couple of obvious things that are necessary for them to, you know, bring food to my house. They know my name, my email address, phone number, address, and information about my payment method (i.e. credit card info or PayPal). 

DoorDash specifically says in their Privacy Policy that they know the items I’ve purchased and when, any special instructions, and the payment method used, but GrubHub doesn’t mention that in theirs. It seems odd — they kind of have to know that information to get me my food, right? — but I’m not sure there’s a strong conclusion to draw from that omission. They do mention, however, that they also know of any communications with them directly or with their “Delivery Partners.”

On the technical side, DoorDash is definitely watching me. They “use cookies, web beacons, pixels, session replay/screen capture, and similar technologies to collect information and personalize [my] experience with [their] Services.” They also use “session replay technology” to “collect real-time” information about how I interact with the app, including how I scroll it. They’re careful to note that they don’t record keystroke data. 

If I access their service through a website instead of my phone (which isn’t a thing I do) or the app on my phone, they also “collect information to better understand customer traffic patterns and Site usage.” That includes the website I visited before visiting their site or app, which parts of the site or app I visited and how much time I spent there. 

If I log in with a third party account, like Facebook, DoorDash will exchange information with that service too. They would also access my phone’s phone book for referrals, if I let them. (Which I don’t.) Finally, they track me across different devices “to better tailor content and features” and provide a “seamless experience.”

And speaking of seamless! (See what I did there?) In addition to the obvious stuff listed above, GrubHub/Seamless tracks transaction info, any communications done in-app or via phone or mail, location information, information about my device(s) and software, and analytics info, including through third party services like Google Analytics. 

But perhaps the creepiest thing that Seamless/GrubHub does is track the exact location of your phone. From their Privacy Policy:
“If you have previously opted into Grubhub’s collection and use of location-based information through our mobile application, we may collect and store the precise location of your device when the app is running in the foreground or background of your device.”

Yikes. That means that if you don’t opt out of location tracking on your phone, they potentially know where you are at all times. 
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