GasBuddy Is a Privacy Nightmare. Here Are Other Ways to Find the Cheapest Gas.

Updated June 8, 2022

This piece has been updated to include steps to limit some of the privacy concerns we have with using GasBuddy.

Thorin Klosowski

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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.

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."

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

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:

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.

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