Apple has introduced new privacy labelling for apps on its App Store - with the aim to make glanceable summaries privacy policies, whose full versions can run to hundreds of pages, as easy to read as nutrition labels on packaged food.
The aim is to make it more clear whatinformation about you is collected by the maker of an app, and how much of your behaviour it tracks - and whether that information is, in turn, made available to third parties. That's an area of keener and keener interest as mobile apps enter areas like payments, and health and fitness tracking.
The 'labelling' appears on an app's App Store page (seen example screen grab below), meaning it does take a couple of clicks to see all the information.
The new policy was introduced this morning NZ time.
All new apps submitted to the App Store will have to supply information for the new privacy labelling.
Existing apps will have to add it with their next upgrade. An Apple rep said the company would give developers time. He said Apple was aware that a particular app might not be a publisher's focus until it's next upgrade cycle - but, equally, app makers can update their privacy labelling at any time.
The new labels aim to give Apple customers an easier way to understand what sort of information an app collects across three categories, the company says: data used to track you, data linked to you and data not linked to you.
"Tracking" refers to the act of linking either user or device data collected from an app with user or device data collected from other apps, websites or even offline properties (like data aggregated from bricks-and-mortar retail receipts) that's used for targeted advertising or advertisement measurement. Tracking also refers to sharing user or device data with data brokers, an Apple rep said.
Apple's new privacy summaries are designed to give a "glanceable" summary of an app's privacy policy - the full version of which might run to hundreds of pages. Image / Apple
"This new privacy information is required for all apps in all of our app stores - including iOS, iPadOS, macOS, watchOS, and tvOS - when developers submit updates or new versions. This reporting of privacy practices is part of the app submission process for all developers, and the same questions must be answered by every app developer globally, including Apple," an Apple rep said.
The new policy was announced at Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference in June, and the company subsequently began requiring developers to supply the privacy summaries with new apps, but today is the first time they have been published.
App publishers who do not comply will risk having a new app potentially blocked from the app store, or an existing app de-listed, the Apple rep said.
Apple says it already has a range of privacy requirements for app developers, including a requirement for a user to opt-in to various types of data collection, sharing or tracking. The rep said the new policy was not about introducing new requirements or asking developers to adopt a new business model, but to make things more transparent and easy to understand for customers.
WhatsApp complained about Apple's new privacy labelling in a company blog post.
The Facebook-owned messaging platform said it was inconsistent for third-party apps to be required to supply privacy labelling, while Apple's own iMessage did not - by dint of being a pre-installed app rather than being distributed through the App Store.
However, the development also spurred WhatsApp to provide a summary of the information it's been required to disclose on Apple's AppStore, including how it shares your shopping activity with its parent, Facebook.
A rep for Apple said although its messaging app was not distributed through the App Store, the company has still made its privacy labelling available online, here. Details for all Apple apps not available through the App Store are online here.
Apple's new App Store privacy policy is separate to the Apple-Google Exposure Notification Framework - the Bluetooth-based contact-tracking system integrated into our government's NZ Covid Tracer app last week.
The Apple-Google solution includes a number of safeguards to anonymise tracing data, which is deleted after 14 days. Privacy Commissioner John Edwards gave the NZ Covid Tracer upgrade his stamp of approval, noting that, among other privacy measures, "No personal information is shared with Apple or Google."
