Is Goodreads safe?
It collects a lot of your data itself.
Our take. Its own App Store privacy label declares Goodreads links 10 categories of your data to your identity, including purchases, contact info, contacts and user content. That collection, more than any outside tracker, is the story here.
Goodreads links 10 categories of your data to you.
From the developer's own App Store privacy label. These are the kinds of data Goodreads ties to your identity.
It carries trackers from 1 company.
Third-party SDKs found in the app, matched to the company that publishes each. Present in the code; we do not observe what they transmit.
Where it sits among book.
Every one of these apps we have scanned, on the two measures above: third-party trackers it carries (across) and data it links to you on its own label (up). Toward the top right is more invasive.
Each dot is one book app. Goodreads sits high on the left: it collects a lot itself but uses few outside trackers.
What it's built from.
All 41 SDKs in the app, grouped by what they are for. 1 are third-party trackers.
1 of the 41 is a third-party tracker. The rest are the app's own code and standard open-source building blocks.
Show the full SDK list
How we know this
Counterspy downloads the app from the App Store and statically analyzes its compiled binary. Embedded SDKs are matched against a signature database and resolved to the company that operates each. We also read the developer's App Store privacy label, which lists the data the app says it collects and links to you. We do not run the app or intercept its traffic, so we report capabilities present in the code and the developer's own disclosures, not proven transmission. We assess privacy and data collection, not malware, security flaws, or developer intent. Reports are automated and never edited for payment. Scan v4.34.0, 2026-04-04.
- Third-party trackers are advertising, analytics and attribution SDKs detected by static signature matching. Presence shows a capability is compiled in, not that it ran or transmitted data.
- "Data the app links to you" is the count of data categories the developer declares as Data Linked To You in its App Store privacy label. Labels are self-reported and not verified by Apple.
- Comparison across the 82 book in our corpus. Trackers: median 5. Data linked to you: median 3.