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Initially announced in June, the changes made to the The App Store rules for its Apple Connection service and the Kids App Category Rules are being modified. New applications must immediately comply with the changed terms, but existing applications will have until early 2020 to comply with the new rules.
The changes announced at Apple's summer developer conference were significant and raised fears that the rules will impede their ability to do business in a world that, frankly, offers difficult alternatives to the revenues generated by the advertising for children's apps.
In a brief interview with TechCrunch, Apple's Phil Schiller said he spent time with developers, analytics companies, and advertising companies to hear what they had to say about the proposals and to make some updates. day.
The changes garner strong statements of support from advocacy groups and advertising providers for children's apps pre-informed of the changes. The changes will appear this morning in the guidelines for Apple developers.
"As we get closer to implementation, we spend more time with developers, analytics companies, and advertising agencies," said Schiller. "Some of them are really forward-thinking, have good ideas and are also trying to be leaders in this space."
With their comments, Schiller said that they had updated the guidelines to allow them to be more applicable to a larger number of scenarios. The goal, he said, was to make the guidelines fairly easy for developers to adopt, while supporting reasonable policies that parents could embrace. According to Mr Schiller, these additional guidelines, in particular concerning the category of applications for children, describe scenarios that might not be resolved by the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) or the General Regulation on Children's Rights. children.
There are two main updates.
Changes for children
The first area that is being refined is children. Sections 1.3 and 5.1.4 of the rules are specifically amended after Apple has talked about their concerns to developers and advertisers and analytics service providers over the last few months.
Both of these rules are being updated to add more nuance to their language in relation to third-party services, such as ads and analytics. In June, Apple announced a very rigid version of these rule updates that essentially banned all third-party advertisements or software analysis and prohibits any transmission of data to third parties. The new rules offer developers the ability to continue to integrate them into their applications, but also impose explicit constraints.
The big changes appear in section 1.3 regarding data security in the category Children. Apple has removed the explicit restriction to include all advertising or analytics of others. It was the huge hammer that the developers saw moving towards their business models.
Instead, Apple has submitted a much more nuanced proposal to application developers. More specifically, it is said that these applications should do not include analyzes or third party announcements, while implicitly acknowledging that there are ways to provide these services and put data security into practice. App Store.
Apple says that, in limited cases, third-party analytics may be authorized as long as the apps in the Kids category do not send personally identifiable information or device fingerprints to third parties. This includes the transmission of IDFA (device ID for advertisers), name, date of birth, e-mail address, location or any other personally identifiable information identifiable.
Third-party contextual ads may be allowed, but only whether the companies providing the ads have publicly documented practices and policies also offer a human revision of advertising creations. This certainly limits the options, including most of the programming service offerings.
Rule 5.1.4 deals with data management in children's applications. In addition to complying with COPPA, GDPR and other local regulations, Apple defines explicit safety barriers.
First, the language used in third-party ads and analytics has changed from "may not" to "should not". Apple discourages their use, but acknowledges that "in limited cases", third party analysis and advertising may be permitted if it adheres to the new rules in guideline 1.3.
The explicit prohibition to transmit all data sent to third parties from apps in the Kids category have been removed. Again, this was the big problem every child application manufacturer was paying attention to.
An additional clause reminds developers not to use terms such as "for kids" and "for kids" in app metadata for apps other than those in the Kids category of the App Store.
SuperAwesome is a company that provides services such as secure ad serving to children's apps. CEO Dylan Collins initially criticized the changes proposed by Apple, noting that removing all third-party applications could decimate the category of apps for kids.
"Apple is clearly very serious about setting the standard for children's apps and digital services," Collins said in a statement to TechCrunch after reviewing the new rules released by Apple. "They have spent a lot of time working with children's technology developers and vendors to ensure policies and tools are designed to create great digital experiences for kids while ensuring their digital privacy and security." . This is the model to follow for all other technology platforms. "
All new applications must follow the instructions. Existing applications still have six months to live in their current form, but must be compliant by March 3, 2020.
"We congratulate Apple for taking concrete steps to protect children's privacy and ensure that children are not targeted for personalized, data-driven marketing," said Josh Golin, executive director of Apple. the Campaign for a Child Without Advertising. "Apple rightly recognizes that personally identifiable information of a child should never be shared with marketers or other third parties. We also appreciate the fact that Apple made these changes on its own, without being dragged by the regulators. "
The CCFC recently had a great success when the FTC announced a $ 170 million fine against YouTube for violating COPPA.
Connect with Apple
The second series of updates concerns the connection with Apple's Apple service.
The connection with Apple is a connection service that can be offered by an application developer to instantly create an account managed by Apple with increased privacy for the user. We have reviewed the offer at length, but the new guidelines contain clarifications and additions to the policy.
Connect with Apple is going Required fields offered by Apple if your application exclusively offers third-party or social connections, such as those of Twitter, Google, LinkedIn Amazon or Facebook. It is do not required if users connect with a unique account created in the application, with for example an email and a password.
But some additional clarifications have been added for additional scenarios. The connection with Apple will not be required under the following conditions:
- Your application uses only your account setup and connection systems.
- Your application is an educational, business or enterprise application that requires the user to connect with an existing educational or business account.
- Your application uses a citizen identification system or a government or industry supported electronic identifier to authenticate users.
- Your app is a customer of a specific third-party service and users must connect directly to their email account, their social media, or to another third-party account to access their content.
Most of them were somehow assumed to be true but were not clear initially in June. The last one, in particular, was the one I wanted to play. This scenario applies, for example, to the Gmail app for iOS, as well as applications such as Tweetbot, which connect via Twitter because they only display Twitter.
As of today, new apps submitted to the store that do not meet any of the above requirements must offer users login with Apple. Current applications and their updates have until April 2020 to comply.
Both of these adjustments come after developers and other application developers have expressed concern that reports have underlined the abruptness and rigor of the changes that have occurred in the context of the increasingly controversial antitrust debate surrounding major technologies. Apple continues to walk the tightrope with the App Store, where it makes its muscles work to improve the data protection of users while simultaneously trying to appear as egalitarian as possible in order to avoid any control of the from regulatory bodies.
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