Starting today, apps in the Mac and iOS App Stores will display mandatory labels that provide a rundown of their privacy policies. Think of it as a sort of "nutrition facts" for apps. It's Apple's most visible move yet to give you easily digestible details about what data every app collects and has access to—and what they do with it.
The idea of developing privacy or security breakdown labels for laypeople isn't new. In the early 2010s, academic researchers had already developed mobile app privacy label prototypes. More recently, countries like Finland, Singapore, and the United Kingdom have started pushing security-focused labels for internet-of-things products. But Apple is seemingly the first global tech giant to embrace and promote the tactic so extensively.
"Apple’s approach looks very promising, but it's unclear how much user testing went into it," says Lorrie Cranor, director of Carnegie Mellon's CyLab Usable Privacy and Security Laboratory. "As it rolls out with real apps and real users it will be interesting to see what works and what doesn’t—whether developers understand how to accurately complete the information, whether they actually tell the truth, and whether consumers understand what this means are all open questions."
Courtesy of Apple
The labels have three categories: Data Used to Track You, Data Linked to You, and Data Not Linked to You, with bullet points for each detailing what the app has going on under the hood. A label might reveal that an app wants to ..
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