Let’s say you see in the description in the iPhone app store that a weather app records your location all of the time and keeps a record of all of the apps where you have entered the same email address. You have no way of knowing what the app maker needs that data for or whether that information is sold or shared with other companies. I have written about digital privacy for years, and I still find it extremely complicated. Is the bottom line that these Apple app privacy disclosures, which are modeled on food nutrition labels, are better than nothing but still not very useful? You can’t compare apps easily, so it’s difficult to know what’s normal activity for an app in any category, and what might be overreaching.

Source: New York Times May 10, 2021 16:41 UTC