Apple is making a special promise to provide more transparency around iOS application data collection by introducing new privacy labels in the App Store.
The company first announced its intention to provide these “nutrition label” privacy disclosures during the WWDC in June, revealing last month that Apple developers must provide this information by December 8 or lose the ability to update their apps. Now, following that deadline, Apple is officially introducing the latest version of iOS 14 to all iOS device owners running it.
Apple says apps on all its platforms, including iOS, iPadOS, macOS, watchOS and tvOS, will need new labels, and they will need to be updated every time a developer submits a new update. Apple is of the same standard, and last week when Facebook-owned WhatsApp was criticized for having obvious inconsistencies in its requirements, the company clarified that, before Apple says so, it will provide labels for all its software.
All of the company’s own first-party applications will have identical expressions on their App Store product pages. If an app does not have the App Store product page, it cannot be deleted, as Apple claims to provide privacy label information on the Internet, just like using messages. Every piece of software in the App Store has its own privacy label visible on the web.
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Picture: Apple
Depending on how the labels are structured, Apple has broken the data collection into three categories: “data used to track you,” “data associated with you” and “data not connected to you.”
Tracking in this context means that data from the application developer application – data collected from your device such as personal information or location data – is linked to other data from other companies’ applications or websites for the purpose of targeted advertising. Advertising related metric. Like data brokers, Apple claims to use the word tracking here to refer to the sharing of user or device information with companies that sell it.
The label “data associated with you” is any data that can be used to identify you. That is, data collected from the use of the app or from having an account with the service or site, and any data that could be used to create a profile for advertising purposes is pulled from the device.
Part of the privacy label that clarifies when certain types of data, such as location data or browsing history, are not attached to you in any identifiable way is “not attached to you”. Apple has specific, developer-centric information on the new labels on its developer portal page, and general information is available on the consumer-facing page.
This is not the last of Apple’s major privacy changes that come with iOS 14. The company wants to release a new privacy feature that requires developers to ask for explicit permission to track iOS device users on apps and websites using a unique device identifier called IDFA. (Or identifier for advertisers) code. With the introduction of iOS 14 this was the required plan, but Apple announced in September that it would delay this feature for a while next year, to give developers more time to comply.