Since December 8th, developers have had to provide further details about data protection within their App Store product page. Now WhatsApp has spoken out against this rule, using iMessage as an example.
Since December 8th, developers have been required to disclose a kind of "nutritional labeling" of their applications. This is intended to give consumers a better overview of an app's privacy practices. The new privacy resource describes several important categories to consider, such as data types, data usage, data linked to users, tracking, links to privacy and how to answer questions about app privacy. But WhatsApp is against this and accuses Apple of anti-competitive behavior because iMessage is already pre-installed and cannot be downloaded from the App Store. Accordingly, iMessage does not have such a label. So explained a WhatsApp spokesperson told Axios:
App data protection: WhatsApp fears competitive disadvantage
We believe that labels should be consistent across all first-party and third-party apps and reflect the strong measures apps can take to protect users' private data. While providing people with easy-to-read information is a good start, we believe it's important that people can compare these 'Privacy Nutrition' labels from apps they download with pre-installed apps like iMessage.
Apple has tried to break down the privacy labels into broad terms such as "financial information" or "user content" to describe the type of data apps collect. However, the Facebook subsidiary believes that these terms could make users concerned about the data collected by WhatsApp, leading to a competitive disadvantage. WhatsApp said it submitted the required information to Apple on Monday. However, the company said in a post that "Apple's template does not explain how far apps can go to protect sensitive information." Apple's app privacy labels are part of a broader privacy effort under iOS 14. The various features, such as restrictions on tracking by apps, have drawn major criticism from Facebook and there are still significant disagreements between companies. (Photo by Denys Prykhodov / Bigstockphoto)
