Privacy experts are divided over the new Data Safety section in Google's Play Store.
How to deal with a policy violation on Google Play
Starting today, apps in the Google Play Store will be required to share details about their data collection and sharing practices, which will be listed under a new Data Safety section. However, as some have noted, Google now expects people to trust these developer-provided privacy considerations, rather than the old Google-generated list of privacy permissions.
“We know that software systems themselves need to establish trust to meaningfully engage users, and any attempt to do so is undermined by an app store that presents self-disclosure as a policy,” Vuk Janosevic, CEO of privacy software provider Blindnet, told Lifewire via email. “If developers have to self-declare what data they collect and for what purposes, the question is: What will Google do to ensure compliance and correctness?”
Google began rolling out the Data Safety section in May, pitching it as a way to give people more insight into the data collection policies of listed apps. Google isn’t the first to do this, with Apple rolling out something similar in December 2020.
