Late last year, Apple enforced App Store 'privacy labels'. For the first time, it's easy to compare how much data an app links to your account

Looking at messaging apps, the contrast is quite stark

Whether equal weighting and contextless inclusion of every item is a good way to convey their relative impact on privacy, other than a glanceable “goodness that’s a lot!”, is another matter

Facebook, for example, isn’t surprising anybody, and by flooding the label they arguably make it harder to separate specific concerns from reasonable practice

For a good discussion of Apple’s first attempt at privacy labels, and how they could be improved, listen to @_DavidSmith and @marcoarment https://overcast.fm/+FgnZ7AyYI 

Apple’s privacy labels are mandatory for app updates since December. So far, 1/3rd of apps have added the labels.

What do most apps actually do? Here’s @K0nserv with an analysis of 3,000 popular apps from different categories: https://hugotunius.se/2021/01/03/an-analysis-of-privacy-on-the-app-store.html

Some of the results are surprising: the vast majority of apps only collect data needed to make the app work, and most don’t include third party tracking.

Some results are less surprising: for those apps that do collect more data types than they need to work, free apps *are* much worse than paid apps.

The worst privacy offender by far: Facebook

It’s not just Messenger: all 12 of the worst offending iOS apps are owned by Facebook

Compiled by @K0nserv

Apple also includes “Data Not Linked to You” in its privacy labels.

Signal, for example, uses phone numbers but they’re not listed under “Data Linked to You”.

This is what that means.

https://support.apple.com/en-gb/HT211970 

Moving from WhatsApp to Signal? Here’s an easy way to bring your groups with you. https://twitter.com/signalapp/status/1347309781564813312