"CyLab Researchers Investigate Apple's Privacy Labels"
A team of researchers at Carnegie Mellon University's CyLab has been studying privacy nutrition labels for more than a decade. Therefore, when Apple introduced privacy labels in their app store, the researchers wanted to find out whether the labels conveyed accurate information and how easy it is for app developers to make the labels. In a paper titled, "Understanding iOS Privacy Nutrition Labels: An Exploratory Large-Scale Analysis of App Store Data," the researchers provide comprehensive measurements of Apple privacy nutrition labels to gain insight into the rate of compliance in the creation of the labels and the accuracy of these labels. They crawled Apple's US app store every week from April to November 2021 to capture information on privacy labels as well as metadata for over 1.4 million total apps. Apps originally published before December 8, 2020, were not required to create privacy labels unless they released app updates but could voluntarily do so, and apps developed after that date were forced to do so. Over 50 percent of the apps available in the app store still do not have a privacy label. According to Yucheng Li, a student in Heinz College's Master of Information Systems Management program and the lead author of the study, the overall compliance rate appears to be steadily increasing, but the speed of compliance on older apps is on a downward trend. The researchers also discovered that app updates seem to drive privacy label creation since 64 percent of the apps released version updates at the same time they published their privacy label. In addition, they found that out of the apps that created a label, 43 percent have made at least one update, but under 6 percent made an update to the label, meaning the current privacy label may not reflect the most up-to-date information. This article continues to discuss the CyLab researchers' findings regarding Apple's privacy labels and key challenges faced by developers in creating accurate privacy nutrition labels.
CyLab reports "CyLab Researchers Investigate Apple's Privacy Labels"