The easy-to-view, self-reported summary, which Apple showcased as part of the WWDC 2020 keynote, will become standard on the App Store later this year.
Inspired by the nutrition labels on food products, Apple, with the launch of iOS 14, will start showing privacy details of apps across 31 categories of data in the product pages itself. Apple said developers will have to fill a form about their apps, based on which these fields will be populated.
The easy-to-view, self-reported summary, which Apple showcased as part of the WWDC 2020 keynote, will become standard on the App Store later this year and will appear for all apps in all of our app stores, including iOS, iPad OS, Mac OS, watchOS and tvOS. When users search for an app, this summary will start appearing alongside other important information about the app, Apple said. Apple will report its practices for native apps also using the same process.
In the Privacy Information section on the App Store product pages, the types of data collected will be represented to users as data link to you, not linked to you, data used to track you or data not collected, Apple said. With this, users will get a headset on the apps they are considering to download and well as apps already on their devices.
In its bid to offer more control, users will also get the ability to customise the location data they are sharing with a particular app by giving it precise location or limiting it to an approximate area. Once this has been customised, users will be able to change the permissions as and when needed.
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Another new privacy feature in iOS 14 will be indicators for when an app is using either the microphone or the camera on your device. According to Apple, when an app has access to the camera that device will show a green indicator light, and when an app has access to the microphone it will show an orange indicator light. This will be regardless of whether the app is in the foreground or the background. If a user sees an indicator and isn’t sure which app is triggering it, they can just check the control centre and see when an app has recently used the mic or camera.
Most of these new features tie into Apple’s efforts to offer more ‘transparency and control’ to users, one of the four pillars of its privacy policy. The other pillars being security, data minimisation, keeping data on the device.