The Privacy Trap Hiding In Free Productivity Apps
Free tools, paid in data Say you open Gmail to check a work email, Slack to catch up on a channel, and Notion to pull up a project doc. All free. All convenient. None of them come with a warning sticker about what they’re quietly collecting. But a 2026 analysis of the ten most common workplace apps found that the average one gathers 19 distinct data points and shares about two types of data with outside parties — often without the user realizing how far that information travels. That’s not just a privacy footnote; it’s the real cost of