An investigation into data safety labels for Android apps available on the Google Play Store has uncovered “serious loopholes” that allow apps to provide misleading or outright false information.
The study, conducted by the Mozilla Foundation as part of its *Privacy Not Included initiative, compared the privacy policies and labels of the 20 most popular paid apps and the 20 most popular free apps on the app marketplace.
It found that, in roughly 80% of the apps reviewed, “the labels were false or misleading based on discrepancies between the apps’ privacy policies and the information apps self-reported on Google’s Data safety form.”
