Cranor weighs in on privacy labels - Engineering and Public Policy - College of Engineering

Engineering and Public Policy FORE Systems Professor, and CyLab Director, Lorrie Cranor was recently featured in The Washington Post in their article on what Android phone’s new “data safety” labels mean.

It used require a fair amount of research to find the exact answer on how you can delete the data apps have on you, but Google is trying to make the things app makers do with our data a little easier to find.

Google says the Android apps you can download in the Play Store have started disclosing how they deal with our data from the kinds they collect to how it’s used, to the reasons it could be shared with third parties. And among other things, these new “data safety” sections require developers to tell people thinking about downloading their app if they can request that their data be deleted.

The good news for consumers is that these kinds of data usage disclosures have become more common over the last few years. Google first announced its plans to push for greater data transparency inside the Play Store in May 2021, well after similar privacy-focused “nutrition labels” started making their way into Apple’s App Store. But even though tech companies have made progress in unpacking the ways our apps try to understand us, privacy researchers aren’t convinced they’ve done enough so far.

“I have been advocating for privacy labels for 20 years,” said Lorrie Cranor, director of the CyLab Security & Privacy Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. “And I had hoped that we could do better.”

Of the types of information Google has asked developers to unpack for would-be app users, Cranor said the company “does seem to be more holistic in talking about security and safety more generally, not just about privacy” the way Apple’s app labels do. Even so, she says she believes there are ways for data disclosures like these to be made even more readable by — and more useful to — non-techies.

“Most of us want privacy, but we don’t want to spend every waking moment thinking about privacy,” she said.

Her suggestions? A straightforward privacy score derived from information disclosed in the label could help people make more informed downloading decisions, as would a tool that allowed people to compare the privacy information of two apps side-by-side. “Not only do I want the app that has a lot of stars and good reviews, but the one that has better privacy,” she added.

Read the full article to learn more about how "data safety labels" help app developers explain how they handle our information.