In this commentary, the speaker explains Apple’s upcoming December 8, 2020 mandate that all App Store developers must disclose any sensitive data they collect—including data gathered by third‑party partners—directly in the App Store listing. The disclosure must detail the types of data (financial, personal, cultural, location, etc.) and how it will be used and shared. The speaker praises Apple’s leadership in privacy transparency and urges the next step: robust enforcement mechanisms, such as verification controls, vendor accountability, and possible financial reserves to ensure compliance, emphasizing the importance of “trust but verify” to protect end‑users’ privacy.
Chapters
Apple is going to be driving privacy transparency for its App Store. Now this is really good news. What's going to happen on December 8th of this year is Apple is going to require application developers to list what sensitive data that they're gathering, not only them but their third-party partners as well, so that end users will be able to when they go to that app, uh, in the App Store, they'll see what potential data it's going to be gathering, how it's going to be used, things of that sort. Now, this is new, and this is really important because it drives transparency to under— to help users understand what data is at risk. And there's a tremendous amount of data here, um, listing for the app developers to have to clarify, to specify, yes, we potentially will gather this data, and this is how we're going to use it. And it could be financial data, it could be personal— data, it could be cultural data, um, location data, all that kind of stuff. Uh, and then how are we using it? Where is it going? So this is a, a great shift, and Apple again is showing leadership in that privacy space. So great job, Apple, in pushing the privacy transparency. What I would like to see the next step is now enforcement. Let's see if we can put controls in place to actually check and vet these vendors. And whether it's outsourcing or crowdsourcing it or making sure that vendors have to set aside a reserve to pay for it in, in case they violate it. But figure out a way to then be able to trust but verify. This is very important into the privacy world, and I think this is going to open up the eyes of end users so that they can understand for the applications that they use every day or even occasionally how it puts their private data potentially at risk.
