WARNING Data Privacy Labels for Most Top Apps in Google Play Store are False or Misleading Hello, We know people say they care about protecting their privacy online. And they say it’s really hard to understand dense privacy policies, confusing technical information, and ever-changing rules and regulations. So anything that can help consumers better understand how an app could invade their privacy before they download it is a good thing, right? Turns out, that’s not always the case. Enter: Google Play Store’s Data Safety Labels. That’s the information consumers find on an app store page when they go to download something from Google’s Play Store. Google says it’s there to help you “make more informed decisions about what apps you use.” Unfortunately, it’s a good idea with bad execution. Mozilla's *Privacy Not Included researchers spent the past few months researching how truthful and accurate the information in those Google Play Store’s Data Safety labels really is. Bad news, we found it’s not very truthful, accurate, or helpful to consumers at all. Some highlights from our research: - In nearly 80% of the apps we reviewed (we looked at the top 20 paid and top 20 free apps), we found discrepancies between the apps’ privacy policies and the information they reported to consumers on Google’s Data Safety form.
- In short, this means the information displayed isn’t useful to consumers when they are deciding whether or not to use an app. A large number of apps – including really popular ones – had significant inaccuracies on the Data Safety Form, which really concerns us. Specifically, 16 out of 40 apps, or 40%, received a “Poor” grade, including Minecraft, Twitter, and Facebook.
- We found two main flaws with the Google Play Store’s Data Safety information.
- The information is self-reported by the app developers, and it’s not always in their best interest to be completely honest.
- Google's own rules for app developers reporting for the Data Safety information is severely flawed.
If you would like to learn more or read the full research report, here is where you should go. What now? First and foremost, we recommend you not trust the Data Safety information in the Google Play Store when making decisions about what apps to download. It’s simply too inaccurate to be useful at this time. We know asking you to read the privacy policy before you download an app is asking a lot – they aren’t easy to read or understand – but that’s your best option right now. And remember, we’ve already broken down a lot of those privacy policies for many apps and devices on the *Privacy Not Included website. Meanwhile, our report has five solid recommendations to help Google make their Data Safety information better. We plan to keep the pressure on them to make improvements. Please stay tuned for more updates as we get to work making Google Play Store’s Data Safety information better for you. Thank you, Jen Caltrider *Privacy Not Included |
