W for PriWacy? W Social

With W Social, a new European social media platform enters the scene in 2026, positioning itself as a dedicated alternative to X. Developed in Sweden, the project focuses on digital sovereignty, privacy, and transparency—areas where European providers are increasingly looking to differentiate themselves. Rather than relying on the infrastructure of major US tech companies, W Social aims to operate entirely under European data protection standards.

From a technical perspective, the platform takes an interesting approach. Users have to verify their identity in an effort to reduce bots, fake accounts, and coordinated disinformation campaigns. At the same time, W Social promises to give users greater control over their personal data. Concepts such as “Verified” and “Values” play a central role in the platform’s identity and vision.

Whether W Social can become a serious competitor to X, Bluesky, or Mastodon remains to be seen. After all, the success of social networks depends not only on technology and privacy features but also on building and maintaining an active community. Nevertheless, the launch demonstrates Europe’s growing ambition to establish its own digital ecosystems and reduce dependence on large US-based platforms.

Unlike many established social networks, W Social also claims not to rely on extensive advertising tracking or the commercialization of user data. While usage information and technical metadata are processed to operate and secure the service, the platform states that it does not create personalized advertising profiles or share data with advertising networks. This represents a significantly more privacy-friendly approach than that of traditional ad-funded social media platforms.

With the new AV-TEST Android Privacy Analysis, such claims can be verified quite easily—and naturally, we put them to the test. The results immediately suggest that the developer is taking its promises seriously. In fact, we were only able to identify a single third-party tracker component: Sentry, which is used exclusively for application crash reporting and diagnostics. During our testing, we did not observe any activity from this component, further supporting the assumption that it is only activated when an actual crash occurs.

The app’s requested permissions also revealed no major concerns at first glance. While permission for precise GPS location access is included—where coarse location data would likely be sufficient—we do not consider this a critical issue as long as it is not used continuously. In our tests, we did not observe any location data being collected at all, although we were only able to progress as far as the waitlist registration process. The privacy policy itself only references location determination via IP address. Another useful indicator when assessing advertising-related user profiling is whether an app requests access to Google AdServices or the Android Advertising ID. Neither of these permissions is requested by W Social.

The privacy policy is also highly detailed and provides comprehensive explanations regarding data collection, processing, and sharing practices. In our view, the Sentry tracker—even though it is used solely for crash analytics—could be mentioned explicitly, but that falls more into the category of minor criticism than a serious issue. Our automated AI-based privacy policy analysis awarded the document 82 out of 100 possible points, which is certainly a respectable result.

The communication analysis revealed only one issue that has become increasingly common: Communication and data transmission from the app begins before users are given the opportunity to read and accept the privacy policy. While no significant amount of data was transferred in this case, strictly speaking, this behavior is just not fully GDPR-compliant. We also observed requests being sent to non-EU servers and found static URLs referencing servers located in the United States within the application itself.

Overall, we believe the developers have done a genuinely good job so far. At least with regard to the Android application, the evidence suggests that they are serious about the privacy commitments they have made. Anyone interested in reviewing the summary report for W Social, as well as reports for many other applications, can now do so through the Android Privacy section of the AV-TEST Intelligence Platform AV-ATLAS.

Eric Clausing has been part of the AV-TEST team since 2015 and is responsible for the conception, implementation and further development of all security and privacy tests and certifications in the area of the Internet of Things.