Privacy Shortcuts Made Mandatory in the App Store and Other Apple App Stores
Apple continues to work to provide greater transparency about what user data is collected and processed by apps in the App Store. We are talking about privacy labels that will mark all applications in the Apple-branded store and which will help users better understand what data is processed by this or that software product.
Application developers had to provide the information necessary to generate privacy labels by December 8. Otherwise, they may not be able to update their software published in the App Store. As for the function itself, from today it is available to all users of devices running iOS 14.
In a statement from Apple about the innovation, it is said that developers must provide the necessary information regarding applications for all platforms of the company, and these are iOS, iPadOS, macOS, watchOS and tvOS. Moreover, the data from which privacy labels are generated must be accurate and up-to-date every time a developer releases an update to their product. It’s worth noting that Apple will also publish privacy shortcuts for its own apps. You can find them in the App Store, and information related to pre-installed applications will be available on the Internet.
As for the labels themselves, they will be formed on the basis of three categories of data: “data used to track you,” “data associated with you” and “data not associated with you.” The first category includes, for example, personal information or device location data that can be combined with information from other applications or sites to serve targeted advertisements. This category also includes data that developers can sell to third parties. The category “data associated with you” includes any information that can be used to identify a user. With regard to “data not associated with you”, here we are talking about the types of information with which the user cannot be identified.
It’s worth noting that the above-mentioned innovations are not the only privacy-related change in iOS 14. Going forward, Apple intends to require developers to obtain explicit consent from iOS device users to track activity in apps and websites using the Identification of Advertisers (IDFA). This feature was originally supposed to appear alongside the launch of iOS 14, but Apple later decided to postpone the launch to next year to give app developers more time to adapt their products to the new requirements.
