An example of how Mozilla rated the apps it examined.
But how did Mozilla’s team reach this conclusion? Well, they took the top 20 free and premium apps from the Google Play Store and checked if how they are labeled matched the actual way the apps behaved. In a rather shocking turn of events, 32 out of the 40 tested apps had at least some minor misconceptions, with 16 of them having heavily misled users. Out of all of the tested apps, only 6 managed to come completely clean.
TikTok’s data safety info on the Play Store is on the left, while its privacy policy is on the right.
The one that will make you go “Ha!” out loud is about Google’s very own apps, which also need a bit of tweaking, as per Mozilla’s findings.
Now, this is both a call to action for moderation and a question regarding the precise competitive nature of the PlayStore. It would seem that Google puts all responsibility for labeling apps properly on the developers, which implies that moderation isn’t really a thing at this point. Furthermore, Mozilla’s examination of the labels themselves concludes that its definitions aren’t exhaustive at all, which damages its idea and impact on the whole.
Jen Caltrider, who led the team that undertook this task, worries that this mislabeling of apps does more harm than good, as users get misled into thinking that an app doesn’t use their private data in instances where it absolutely does.
While labels in theory are a really cool and straightforward way of informing people, the idea itself circles around to something that Google Play often does: it gives tools, but heavily under defines them, which leads to instances like this. Hopefully, Google will take the feedback and run with it, because the overall idea is still valuable for the store and for its consumers.
