Apple’s Important New Privacy Labels

Although you may not realize it many companies and harvesting your online activity. All aspects of what you do online constitutes one pieces of their crop. They combine your data with countless others and the entire crop of data is sold, sometimes processed sometimes raw, to any and all comers.

But the data they collect is not traceable to me so why do I care? For starters, that is a very naive assumption. Why do you think a search on Google or Amazon has you seeing ads for that exact item on just about every web site you visit?

Shopping efficiency is just the tip of the iceberg. That is what makes billions of dollars for Google, Facebook, Twitter, Microsoft and, yes, even Apple. A bigger issue is what those who buy the data are doing with it.

One indication of the importance of privacy is the reaction of companies who profit from it when they are blocked by higher levels of it. Facebook, for example, is now in a heated war with Apple over these privacy “nutrition labels”. Gee, I wonder why.

Knowing how your data is being monetized and how you are being manipulated (via political ads) is clearly just the first step, and it is an incredibly important one. The next step, which no company can do for you, is to give a shit.

In Apple’s case their efforts have been fairly consistent over the years regarding their emphasis on privacy. But their move to help their users understand what every app is doing in this area only goes back to this past December.

That’s when they began letting folks know what incursions into your privacy each app wanted and, if available, why they wanted it. You can see this info in the product page listings in its iPhone and iPad App Stores.

Of course, just like the nutrition labels on the food you buy, they’re only as good as the accuracy of the information. While the Food and Drug Administration (in the USA) monitors nutrition labels, there is no over-arching agency to monitor privacy labels. As you’d expect, where there is no enforcement there is plenty of room for mis- and dis- information.

Now that your expectations are set, make sure you at least give these new labels a try. To help you Apple has posted a page with some details. Definitely worth a read.

Apple tells developers “You’re responsible for keeping your responses accurate and up to date”. As already stated in these early days the accuracy of the information may not be what it should be, but it is a start and we hope to see more companies taking it very seriously and provide more complete and accurate info.

The first important signal that this is a shift for the better, as far as consumers are concerned, is that Facebook hates it.

For example, an article in Inc. Magazine is titled “Facebook’s New Privacy Pop-Up Shows the Company Just Doesn’t Get It” and lays out the difference between only caring about monitoring your customers and actually caring about your customers.

The key is controlling what you offer that has value. Think about it, every time you search for a product that search has value. Every time you log onto Facebook and check your newsfeed, that action has value.

The bottom line is that Apple’s new Privacy Labels put you more in the driver’s seat and less in the slaughterhouse. Make it a point to read the labels and, whenever possible, opt for an app that is more transparent and provides more detail about exactly what they track and why they track it.

Over time this will be the norm, change is always hard, but change is coming and Mark Zuckerberg will just have to learn how to make a buck (or rather many billions of bucks) while treating his customers with respect. Wow, imagine that!

Well there you have it. Give it a try and let us know what you think.

Source link:https://www.theiphoneappreview.com/what-you-need-to-know-about-apples-new-privacy-labels/

from : Mid Atlantic Consulting, Inc.