RAINN

First reviewed April 20, 2022. Review updated, April 25, 2023

In 2022 when we reviewed RAINN's app, we found some good and some bad. The good being the app does not require a users to provide an email or any personal information to download or use. This anonymity is important for people vulnerable to sexual and domestic violence. The bad was that we couldn't find a privacy policy that specifically mentions it covers RAINN's app privacy. The only privacy policy we could find, and the one linked to from the app store pages, only mentions that it covers RAINN's "sites."

Upon revisiting the RAINN app in 2023, we found the same concerns, and a few additional ones. The current privacy policy on the RAINN site doesn’t make an explicit mention of an app, only "sites", so it’s unclear upfront that this privacy policy covers the app. Also, according to the Apple App Store page, RAINN last updated their app in November 2020 and their Google Play Store page doesn't list any data safety information or updates on their app. This raises the concern that RAINN doesn't support this app any longer. If that is the case, then in the interests of privacy and security, RAINN should either remove the app from the apps stores, or update the app and the privacy policy to better reflect what privacy policies cover their app.

Something else we discovered in our review in 2023 is that RAINN has updated their online privacy policy on January 26, 2023. In this version of RAINN's privacy policy, RAINN states that they can collect personal information for visitors to their sites such as name, address, phone number, email address, and information about you from third parties that is publicly available and use this to combine with the personal information they know about you. They go on to say they could this personal information "to deliver relevant advertising to you". This feels like bad form to us. A non-profit that supports sexual violence victims and survivors, using the personal information of people who visit their website to target them with ads just doesn't feel right to us at all.

Read our 2022 review:

RAINN's app privacy policy says none of your personally identifiable information is ever collected by RAINN or shared with anyone else. Yay!!! That's amazing. RAINN is a non-profit and received funding from the US Department of Justice to help develop this app so no worries about them collecting your data to make money off it or target you with ads. RAINN gets the vulnerability of their users and seems to take protecting their privacy quite seriously. We are concerned that their privacy policy, the one linked from the app store, doesn't mention specifically that it covers their app, only their website. When you download and install the app though, users are given and must agree to a privacy policy for the app. We would love to see the app's specific privacy policy available to users before they download the app though.

RAINN does use Google Analytics (as nearly every app we reviewed does) to determine app usage statistics but only collects anonymized location data at the city/state/country level. Which doesn't worry us too much, although we must always warn that anonymized data has been found to be relatively easy to de-anonymize. RAINN also includes a safety procedure warning to delete the app after every use if an abuser has access to your device. And follows this with a reminder that the history of downloading the app will still exist in backups, synced files, and the app store history. Which is a huge reminder that almost anything we do on the internet leaves a trail, that domestic abusers are the scum of the earth, and that remaining private while seeking help for violence or mental health situations online can be both live-saving and life-threatening for too many people.

We do have some questions about the security of the RAINN app we couldn't answer. And when we emailed and called RAINN to try and get answers, we didn't receive any response, which is a concern. We noticed the RAINN app hasn't been updated in the Google Play store since November 2020. That long without an update doesn't mean anything is wrong. It does show that no security updates have been done (hopefully because they haven't been needed) in a while. This could be nothing major, we're just noting this as it's good when apps are updated when needed. All in all, RAINN's app privacy is excellent. Their security is a bit of a question for us. We also recognize non-profit backed apps don't generally have the same resources to provide security as bigger companies do. Hopefully nothing will go wrong there, but do be aware.