There's Still No Sign of Privacy Labels On Most Google iOS Apps (macrumors.com) 41
As of December 8, Apple has been requiring developers to provide privacy label information to their apps, outlining the data that each app collects from users when it is installed. Many app developers have included the labels, but there's one notable outlier -- Google. schwit1 shares a report from MacRumors: Google has not updated its major apps like Gmail, Google Maps, Chrome, and YouTube since December 7 or before, and most Google apps have to date have not been updated with the Privacy Label feature. The Google Translate, Google Authenticator, Motion Stills, Google Play Movies, and Google Classroom apps do include privacy labels even though they have not been updated recently, but Google's search app, Google Maps, Chrome, Waze, YouTube, Google Drive, Google Photos, Google Home, Gmail, Google Docs, Google Assistant, Google Sheets, Google Calendar, Google Slides, Google One, Google Earth, YouTube Music, Hangouts, Google Tasks, Google Meet, Google Pay, PhotoScan, Google Voice, Google News, Gboard, Google Podcasts, and more do not display the information.
On January 5, Google told TechCrunch that the data would be added to its iOS apps "this week or the next week," but both this week and the next week have come and gone with no update. It has now been well over a month since Google last updated its apps. "To lightly paraphrase former Google CEO Eric Schmidt: If your data harvesting is something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place," adds schwit1.
On January 5, Google told TechCrunch that the data would be added to its iOS apps "this week or the next week," but both this week and the next week have come and gone with no update. It has now been well over a month since Google last updated its apps. "To lightly paraphrase former Google CEO Eric Schmidt: If your data harvesting is something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place," adds schwit1.
Apps are just the beginning (Score:5, Interesting)
For the past two years I've been working on a project that allow privacy labels to be made for companies, projects, and everything in between:
https://www.privacylabel.org/ [privacylabel.org]
It acts as a universal summary for privacy policies, which might make it easier to compare products and providers.
It's open source and free as in freedom. We're planning to officially launch this year.
Re: Apps are just the beginning (Score:2)
There ia just one privacy label necessary:
"We don't share anything with anyone, PERIOD. And even if we would, it's designed so we can't."
Anything else can go straigt to to fuck it bucket under one umbrella.
In other words: If it needs a GDPR label, it's dead to me.
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Google - Privacy you have none. Email is a postcard, ALL EMAIL that touches their system, including Google broadband, how invasive do you think they are on that, data mining all of it all of the time. The biggest climate change hypocrites on the planet, virtue signalling all sorts of green technology whilst being the number one pushers of wasteful consumption, number cheer leaders of catastrophic climate change, whilst pretending to want to prevent it.
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Better stop using the internet and your smartphone then...
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It is not only about who they are sharing the data with, but also about what data they collect for themselves.
Suppose they're storing info about the temperature in your house, via your "smart thermometer". That seems reasonable, because that is what the device is supposed to be doing.
However, imagine that they run the numbers through a bunch of algorithms to infer additional things about you - when you are at home, home many people are in the household, what activities are they engaged in...
A GDPR transpare
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Thanks for sharing the link about your work. I'm working on the same problem and I believe the design you're proposing can be improved.
- Take a "layered" approach, where a more compact representation is shown first, but users can click around to get more info if they want to
- In the usability tests that I ran for a label design, I found out that people want to know what partner company gets what data and for what purpose. In other words it is not sufficient to just enumerate purposes and partners, they nee
This is the reason I hate Google products! (Score:5, Interesting)
Company X is heavily invested in the Google landscape, leveraging many of their products and I told them point blank that you can't honestly say you have safe data handling and collection practices when you don't have any clue what's being collected and how it's being handled, and when you use Google products every piece of data that enters one of their products is scanned, analyzed and monetized (if possible).
It's not a stretch to say that Google has the same respect for your privacy and the privacy of your data as NAMBLA does regarding the safety of children, absolutely none.
When you consider the excellent alternatives to almost any Google Product, it amazing we still use any of their products. What primary product in the Google family doesn't have a better alternative replacement? I de-Googled years ago and it wasn't hard, painful or a chore, and honestly I'll never go back, because their products aren't better, or even on par.
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What's a good alternative to the Firebase family? I was looking at a new project, and considering Firebase because it's all in one solution. It combines that synced live-nosql db, auth, analytics, ab testing, deep links and ads. Also one click stripe and email integration.
Re: This is the reason I hate Google products! (Score:2)
Picking all-in-one is already the bad choice. You're asking for lock-in.
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I'm willing to use multiple solutions, if they integrate well. But that makes finding replacements even more difficult.
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I de-Googled years ago and it wasn't hard, painful or a chore, and honestly I'll never go back, because their products aren't better, or even on par.
Yes, better do it now, yourself, rather than having to deal with the nightmare scenario we've all heard where Google suddenly disables your account for unknown reasons, literally cutting some people out of all their data and means of access to their tools.
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I de-Googled years ago and it wasn't hard, painful or a chore, and honestly I'll never go back, because their products aren't better, or even on par.
Yes, better do it now, yourself, rather than having to deal with the nightmare scenario we've all heard where Google suddenly disables your account for unknown reasons, literally cutting some people out of all their data and means of access to their tools.
It only dawned on me the other day that over the years I've forgotten how much stuff is tied to cloud services and how any of those accounts could suddenly be terminated. Now I have to do some work to try to export everything to my own backups. Bleargh.
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I remember in university the school told us that our emails would stay with us after gradation, and I verified that claim with the IT department. I used that email for almost all cloud services and 6 months after I graduated they removed access to it, locking all cloud accounts at the time. Ever since then I keep a backup of all cloud files, because I'm n
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Eric Schmidt (Score:2)
"To lightly paraphrase former Google CEO Eric Schmidt: If your data harvesting is something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place," adds schwit1.
Well, given how Google conducts itself now, if Eric Schmidt was "adult supervision" while Google was "growing up", then I'd say he was a pretty shitty "parent".
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If your data harvesting is something that is so bad that you daren't say what harvesting you're doing in your privacy policies then maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place.
Google 100% opt-out option (theonion) (Score:1)
Remember, there is always the 100% opt out option :
https://www.theonion.com/googl... [theonion.com]
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China is doing exactly that with the Uyghurs.
No Data Being Collected? (Score:1)
Is it possible no label has been added because no data is being collected?
It's a possibility.
Re: No Data Being Collected? (Score:2)
No that is literally against the laws of Google's nature.
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No - for one, that label is easy to find. Google engineers (self-identified) have popped up on /. claiming its because with all the libraries they use, they cannot figure out what data is actually being gathered.
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Also worth noting, this is the same outfit that is very strict with bug disclosure timelines for others (one of several examples) [slashdot.org]. Goose, gander? Shame.
Re: No Data Being Collected? (Score:2)
No - for one, that label is easy to find. Google engineers (self-identified) have popped up on /. claiming its because with all the libraries they use, they cannot figure out what data is actually being gathered.
Oh, PUH-lease!
Do those G-shills really expect anyone with more than 2 functioning brain cells to believe they can't figure out what data is potentially harvested by their own, in-built datamining libraries?
To believe that, would require belief in the proposition that they just have one giant heap of information, with absolutely no categorization; which should be easily seen as a bald-faced lie to even the most casual and non-technical user.
TL;DR Tell me another one, Daddy!
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No, that is not a realistic possibility.
According to the GDPR, the data subject has the right to know what sort of data are collected, and for what purpose. If they ask the data controller about it (Google, in this case), the controller has to explicitly say "no data are collected".
In other words, the lack of an answer is not the equivalent of "nothing is collected". It is merely an indication of the fact that the controller does not allow the data subjects to exercise their rights.
If I were Apple... (Score:2)
I'd just remove the entire Google developer account for $someViolation.
Seems to be all the rage these days.
And then hit them wirh a monopolism investigation before they can try that on Apple.
No kill like overkill.
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Apple and Google didn't interrupt a Joint Session of Congress yet...
Holiday Freeze about to lift... (Score:2)
Google has a tradition of locking down code changes during the US Holiday Period, and therefore hasn't released anything noteworthy lately. Apple isn't banning apps that don't update for this yet... so look for this in the next version release of Google's apps. Right now ,it's not yet a problem that affects users.
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It has nothing to do with the holiday lockdown. Google engineers on /. have said its because with all the libraries they don't have a good handle on what data they are collecting and want to update their build processes easier to keep it up to date in the future.
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Well, this seems to be a war between too Alphabet letters, G and D... Google and DoubleClick. D doesn't like to tell what it's doing, because if they did they might be banned. G just likes to make things work, and get paid by D to do so.
Suggestion, not a requirement (Score:1)
If Apple hasn't taken Google apps which violate the requirement out of the App Store, then it's not a requirement. It's a polite suggestion at best - "please add this label we've told you about months ago, but if you don't, nothing will happen". Good PR for Apple I guess, but obviously not a requirement.
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Google can't update their apps without publishing this data so at some point they are going to have to in order to keep the apps working. This was a reasonable move on apples part, they announced this back at the WWDC so you had plenty of time to figure out what your label would look like (and to clean up your act if you didn't like how it would look to users). Now they are forcing you to include this data with any update.
Google will have to update sometime so this data will go out, app that don't update
Search engine (Score:1)
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They sort-of already started. Safari does a Siri search augmented by your web search provider. It will suggest wikipedia articles, shows results from bookmarks and history, will recognize and try to handle requests like flight numbers and tracking numbers, etc before ever sending you to a search results page.
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Worse than the Stasi label needed (Score:1)