GasBuddy Can Be a Privacy Nightmare. Here’s How to Limit Your Exposure.

With the price of a gallon of gas hitting new highs, now averaging $4.60- a gallon in the United States, it’s increasingly important to find the cheapest gas available wherever you are. A common recommendation for finding cheaper gas is the crowdsourced gas-price finder app GasBuddy. But when we took a closer look at the app, its privacy practices set off alarms.

Why we don’t recommend GasBuddy

At a glance, the GasBuddy app is meant to save you money on gas, and it offers you a chance to earn points based on other purchases for more gas. But like most savings programs, GasBuddy’s program appears to slurp up plenty of data about you. According to its privacy policy (and as previously reported by Car and Driver), it collects and shares mountains of information—including your location, if you enable that, which is both valuable to advertisers and very personally identifiable. (If you want to put a number on it, a 2017 lawsuit revealed that GasBuddy was selling location data for $9.50 per 1,000 users.) GasBuddy then may share your location with Cuebiq and Foursquare, two of the larger location-data brokers in the industry.

GasBuddy also has an optional feature called Drive, which collects and shares information about your driving habits with Arity, a company that is owned by Allstate and has its own fun-to-read privacy policy. If you turn the Drive feature on, GasBuddy may share the information it collects about your driving habits with insurance companies “in order to produce a score which may predict the level of driver riskiness.”

Set up GasBuddy as privately as possible

GasBuddy offers some control over this data sharing that sets it up more privately, which we recommend doing if you choose to use it.

• You can opt out of sharing your location by tapping the user icon and then going to Location Settings > Location Privacy.
• If you use an iPhone, you can disable tracking by opening the Settings app, tapping Privacy > Tracking, then scrolling down to GasBuddy (if you don’t have “Allow Apps to Ask to Request to Track” enabled you can skip this step).
• You can also use the app without an account and without approving the location permission by typing your zip code into the search instead of letting the app pinpoint you automatically. This is the approach we suggest.

Alternatives you can use to search gas prices

GasBuddy isn’t the only way to find cheap gas. Instead of downloading yet another app, we suggest using one you probably already have installed, or just searching in your web browser:

• Google Maps (or Waze): Open up Google Maps or Waze in your browser or in the smartphone app and then type in “gas” or tap the Gas button below the search bar. You’ll see the prices of gas at each gas station on the map. Click or tap any of those listings, and you’ll get a full breakdown by gas grade. You’ll also see a warning if the listed price is outdated. Of course, Google and Waze (the latter of which Google owns) have their own privacy concerns, but there’s a reasonable chance you already have Google stuff installed on your phone anyway.
• Geico’s gas search: The insurance company Geico has its own browser-based cheap-gas search engine, which tends to be less invasive than an app. Type in your zip code, and it shows you the cheapest nearby gas, as well as the last time that data was checked. If you’re looking for the cheapest gas near your office or home, this is the easiest way to find it.
• GasBuddy’s browser-based search: Although GasBuddy’s mobile apps aren’t up to our privacy standards, you can just use its browser-based search engine. And you can even keep any snooping at bay with a browser extension or a burner browser on your phone. With this option, you obviously don’t get the rewards and rebates the app-based service offers, but you do get directed to the cheapest gas in the neighborhood.

In our small unscientific test using a neighborhood in Los Angeles, we found that Geico and GasBuddy tended to have the most updated info, with the listings on Google Maps and Waze often being more than 24 hours old. AAA also has some recommendations for improving gas mileage; notably, it suggests saving a bit of dough by fueling up with regular instead of premium if that’s what your car’s manual recommends.

This article was edited by Treye Green and Annemarie Conte.