Google failure to update more than 80 apps to comply with Apple’s ‘nutrition label’ requirement means users are being told apps are out of date
Google’s privacy standoff with Apple has lasted so long that even the company’s own apps are complaining about it.
Since early December,
Apple has required any iOS app to include a privacy “nutrition label”, listing all the ways the app uses personal data.
Those labels, which are written by the app developers, range from short and sweet – the podcast app Overcast, for instance, lists six uses of personal data, from usage information for analytics to user IDs for the app’s sign-in functionality – to somewhat longer. Facebook lists 80 different data categories it uses, for purposes from tracking users around the web to personalising the app.
Google, however, has yet to provide its own labels. The company only has to do so when it updates its apps, which it stopped doing late last year. The
iOS version of Google Chrome, for instance, was updated roughly every two weeks throughout 2020, until two months ago when it received its last update. Google Photos was updated almost weekly until two months ago; so too were YouTube, Google Maps and Gmail.
www.theguardian.com
