Longitudinal Analysis of Privacy Labels in the Apple App Store

06/06/2022

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by   David G. Balash, et al.

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In December of 2020, Apple started to require app developers to annotate their apps with privacy labels that indicate what data is collected and how it is used. We collected and analyzed 36 weekly snapshots of 1.6 million apps between July 15, 2021 and March 17, 2022 to better understand the privacy label ecosystem, the categories and types of data collected, and the purposes that developers used to justify that collection. Nearly two years after privacy labels launched, only 60.5 average of 0.5 coming into compliance. Of apps with labels, 17.3 users, 37.6 data that is not linked. Only 42.1 not collect any data. We find that because many apps indicate that they do not collect any data, even apps that would seem likely to collect or link data, trusting the veracity of privacy labels is still an open question.