Abide

You know what privacy researchers really can't abide? Vague privacy policies like Abide's. Why would companies be vague about what personal information the collect and how they use it unless they want to have lots of wiggle room in their privacy policies to collect a lot of personal information and use it in ways that go beyond the scope of the product they provide? Is that what Abide does? Who knows, we just can't tell.

What kind of personal information does Abide say they can collect? Well, they're vague about that, of course. They say, "We collect certain personal information, like your name, picture, email address and any other information you provide to us," which doesn't tell us much. How do they say they use this information? Well, again, here they are vague. They say can use it for your standard business practices like providing information you request, sending emails, and facilitate the use of their services. Then they say they use the information they collect "for any other purpose for which the information was collected." Which, uh, that feels kinda broad and undefined, right?

Interestingly, the words "marketing" and "advertising" do not appear anywhere in Abide's privacy policy. Does that mean Abide doesn't use your data for those purposes? Hard to say. What Abide does say is they can use information they collect "for any other purpose for which the information was collected." which is a rather vague and confusing statement to us. Abide also doesn’t specifically state in their privacy policy that they don’t sell user data, which is something we like to see stated clearly. We can hope Abide makes their money through their subscriptions to the service and sharing their users' data for undefined purposes.. 🤞🏼 We just can't tell though.

Finally, Abide doesn't meet our Minimum Security Standards because we were able to login with the weak password "11111111". So, what could happen if something goes wrong? Well, would it be wrong of us to say we just don't know but we pray nothing bad ever happens? We do worry though, as other prayer apps like Pray.com have been reported to do a whole bunch of data profiteering on their users. We wish we could be sure Abide doesn't do the same, but we aren't sure of that at all.