After Public Outcry, Google Will Reinstate Play Store App Permissions List
upstart writes:
New "Data Safety" alternative runs on the honor system, and that's not good enough:
Last week, Google started more widely rolling out the new "Data Safety" screen in the Play Store, and it made waves in the tech world when we found out that the new section was a replacement for the normal app permissions display, not a new screen in addition to it. After the negative public reaction to the news, the official Android Developers Twitter account promised to revert the change and let the permissions screen display side by side with the new Data Safety display.
"Data Safety" is a new Play Store section that lets developers list what data an app collects, how that data is stored, and who the data is shared with. [...] The app permissions list is a factual, computer-generated record of what permissions an app can request, while the Data Safety section is written by the developer. You can't cheat the app permissions list, while Data Safety runs on the honor system.
[...] Google is a very data-hungry company, and the removal of the permissions screen was one more papercut for people trying to protect their privacy. Reinstating the permissions screen is a Band-Aid fix, and it still seems like Google should just apply its permissions detection to the Data Safety screen and then require developers to add details about why the data is collected and how it's stored. Google already built an automated permissions detection system, and instead of throwing the whole thing out, it could just let developers add details to it.
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