What We Learned From Apple’s New Privacy Labels - The New York Times

Requiring that app makers list the data they collect reveals a lot about what some apps do with our information (ahem, WhatsApp) but creates confusion about others.

Apps must now include so-called privacy labels, which list the types of data being collected in an easily scannable format.

Then I focused on the privacy labels for the messaging apps WhatsApp and Signal, the streaming music apps Spotify and Apple Music and, for fun, MyQ, the app I use to open my garage door remotely.

The privacy labels showed that apps that appear identical in function can vastly differ in how they handle our information.

Below is the privacy label for WhatsApp.

The labels immediately made it clear that WhatsApp taps far more of our data than Signal does.

For group chats, the WhatsApp privacy label showed that the app has access to user content, which includes group chat names and group profile photos.

For people’s contacts, the WhatsApp privacy label showed that the app can get access to our contacts list; Signal does not.

A WhatsApp spokeswoman referred to the company’s website explaining its privacy label.

Finally, I compared the privacy labels for two streaming music apps: Spotify and Apple Music.

These look different from the other labels featured in this article because they are just previews — Spotify’s label was so long that we could not display the entirety of it.

Apple Music’s privacy label suggested that it linked data to you for advertising purposes — even though the app doesn’t show or play ads.

The privacy labels are especially confusing when it comes to Apple’s own apps.

That’s because while some Apple apps appeared in the App Store with privacy labels, others did not.

Apple said only some of its apps — like FaceTime, Mail and Apple Maps — could be deleted and downloaded again in the App Store, so those can be found there with privacy labels.

But its Phone and Messages apps cannot be deleted from devices and so do not have privacy labels in the App Store.

“I can’t imagine my mother would ever stop to look at a label and say, ‘Let me look at the data linked to me and the data not linked to me,’” she said