This is not a clickbait. This is the real price for a monthly subscription with an app that reveals all your private contact details, including cell phone numbers, home phone numbers, personal and professional e-mail addresses. You don't need to know the name of the app - there are several anyway. But you need to know how these apps work, so you can protect your private contact details, although chances are you have been profiled already.

It all starts with LinkedIn

You thought LinkedIn is protecting your private contact information, as described in their privacy policy. While in fact, they do not disclose your contact details, they do disclose - or so you allow them to do - your name, your position, your location. and the company you work for. Now these pieces of information may not constitute contact details, but they are still private information that only you should choose to disclose - not even your employer.

Although it seems to be an innocent disclosure, letting people know who your employer is, is like providing them your personal business e-mail address. This is because most server admins select one of five or six formats for the email address of each employee. So, unless your employer has set up their mail server on a different domain name, to the server hosting their public website, consider your business e-mail address to be publicly available to everyone.

LinkedIn is just the tip of the iceberg

Your employer's server admin, may have placed anti-spam rules on the server, so you don't get distracted by promotions or scam messages. Those rules may range from quite mild to very strict. So, spamming apps will try to find alternative e-mail addresses, such as your GMail or Hotmail accounts. With contact details scraped from LinkedIn, they can map details from other contact detail sets they get their hands on (more on that later), especially if the combination of location, name, and surname is quite rare.

They don't need your GMail or Hotmail account to send you spam - although your promotions folder is already flooded with promotions you don't care at all about. They need it to find you on your other social media accounts; Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, when they do targeted promotions. How? You signed for an account with Facebook or Twitter using your GMail or Hotmail account, you silly! Your profile there is searchable by anyone only by entering your GMail or Hotmail account.

Your friends and contacts, are your worst privacy nightmare

In a recent research we conducted, 68% of respondents said they would provide access in their address book to a free app in exchange for been able to use that app.

Let's say your friend downloads an app, that requests permission to access their address book for no apparent reason. This happens upon installation of that app. Once your friend has granted access to the app, the app will read all his contacts, including you, and upload it to the servers of that app. So, the creators of the app have now stored on their servers all your contact details, including your private cell phone number, your private e-mail address, even your social media accounts.

Privacy policy? What privacy policy? Privacy policy is for the user to believe that the freebie app creators do care about his/her privacy, so he/she provides access to his/her address book. Who said they are obliged to follow what is promised in that policy? They are only obliged - although, not everywhere - to have one; not to follow it. So, they will happily sell your contact info to profiling apps, anywhere from one to ten cents per contact.

Then, the profiling app is combining all data sets and offering a full contact profile to their users while they are browsing your LinkedIn profile, for as low as 57 cents a piece. They don't need to ask you to connect with them. That's for the legit ones.

Is all this legal?

There is not one answer to that. In the US and Canada there is no legislation prohibiting apps like the one mentioned in the beginning, from creating a contact details profile - with the exception of the State of California. If the app has somehow received consent to access contact details stored in your address book, they are covered. In the EU, there is the GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation), but authorities policing its application are overwhelmed with requests and complaints - and the examination process takes months, if not years. So, even with GDPR in place, profiling apps have ample time to exploit your contact details and make thousands of dollars, until they are caught.

The only way to protect yourself, is to provide only the absolutely necessary contact details to your friends and contacts.