New Mozilla Study Proves Major Discrepancies Between Privacy Policies And Play Store Labels

In the past year, we saw Google make a number of changes to its Play Store. And that is what forced so many app developers to include safety labels with the listings of their products.

The whole idea was related to making users understand which data would be accessed by an app and which of it gets shared with the likes of third parties. Moreover, the perfect example is Apple’s Nutrition Labels. The goal is to make users glance at it at one time and realize what it’s about.

But Mozilla’s new study is making some major claims about leading apps across the Play Store. It says so many discrepancies are present between the Google Play Store’s label and the privacy policies laid out.

To reach this conclusion, Mozilla took a glance over the leading top 20 paid applications as well as the top 20 apps that were being offered for free on the Play Store. And they found that nearly 80% of them had some huge discrepancies between this privacy policy and disclosures at the Play Store.  

Meanwhile, around 40% showed major changes between the two and just six out of the 40 applications got positive ratings from Mozilla.

Among those that received poor ratings are some huge and popular services such as Snapchat, Facebook apps, push Services by Samsung, and Twitter. They all really got poor ratings.

The study showed that although the data safety form by Google Play fails to share data with others including third parties, the privacy policy list has so many service providers like Facebook and Google. It similarly adds how the Android maker may end up sharing data with other creators and advertisers as well.

The company’s own apps are struggling and need to be enhanced as per Mozilla’s findings. Meanwhile, platforms like Chrome, Maps, Gmail, and YouTube are showing major discrepancies as well between the labels and the policy outlined. And that has games like Candy Crush Sage included as well.

Furthermore, the study talks about issues linked to Google surveys developers in terms of safety data seen on the listings of the Play Store. It looks as if the developers are being put on the spot as if they are the sole ones responsible for the errors and that there is no check and balance being provided by the firm’s other teams.

There were similarly so many discrepancies seen in the way the search engine giant defines the words in the disclosures with vague definitions on the terms data sharing. And in the end, it just makes it so much harder for developers to hide details, further causing the spread of misinformation while misleading users.

Experts feel the problem here has to do with the labels on the Play Store. The goal is to simplify and make privacy policies more standardized. But at the same time, so many firms are publishing apps across the Play and Apple Stores with terms that are so confusing that until and unless they aren’t revised, the problem will continue for years.