Google’s most popular iPhone apps went weeks without privacy labels or mandatory updates

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Three weeks after Google promised to add mandatory privacy labels to Apple’s apps “starting this week,” none of the company’s major apps have the labels, including Gmail, Search, Photos, Docs, and YouTube .

There have been questions about whether Google isn’t deliberately updating its apps to avoid labels, so I scoured all of the Google apps in the iOS App Store to see if the updates were up to date. come.

Some have: 12 apps now have iOS privacy labels, although they aren’t as recognizable as YouTube or Gmail:

  • Stadiums
  • Google Translate
  • Google Authenticator
  • Google Play Movies & TV
  • Google Classroom
  • Google Fiber
  • Google Fiber TV
  • Wear OS
  • Onduo for diabetes
  • Project reference
  • Google Smart Lock
  • Motion Stills – GIF, Collage

Clicking on the privacy labels, they seem to make sense. Some of the apps, like Google Authenticator, don’t capture a lot of information, while Google Translate and Classroom have quite a long list of privacy notices.

Again, this doesn’t necessarily mean that Google is capturing all of this information just when opening the application. The privacy label shows everything the app may capture depending on the features you use. And while you might have to scroll down a bit, it has nothing to do with Facebook’s seemingly endless list.

Privacy information for Authenticator fits on one screen.

There are, however, a few quirks. “Motion Stills – GIF, Collage” is an app that has not been updated for three years, but has privacy labels. It’s probably fair to say that this wasn’t the app we had in mind when Google promised to start rolling out them.

The privacy label for an app that hasn’t been updated for three years.

Apple launched these privacy labels on December 14, and companies like Google can no longer update their apps unless they add these privacy labels first. So when some people noticed that Google had stopped updating its apps, they speculated that maybe it was to avoid having to admit the amount of data it was collecting.

Google denied this, saying explicitly TechCrunch that it wasn’t withholding updates, and that it committed to adding the labels when those updates were ready. The company reiterated that promise in a privacy-focused blog post on January 12:

As Google’s iOS apps are updated with new features or to fix bugs, you will see updates to our app page listings that include the new app privacy details. . These labels represent the maximum categories of data that can be collected, that is, if you are using all the features and services available in the application.

They unfold. It’s just not clear when Google will update its most popular apps – the ones that probably suck up the most user data, anyway.



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