How Apps Use Your Data: Just a Half Effort
April 28, 2022
I read an quite enthusiastic article called “Google Forces Developers to Provide Details on How Apps Use Your Data.” The main idea is virtue signaling with one of those flashing airport beacons. These can be seen through certain types of “info fog,” just not today’s info fog. The digital climate has a number of characteristics. One is obfuscation.
The write up states:
… the Data safety feature is now on the Google Play Store and aims to bolster security by providing users details on how an app is using their information. Developers are required to complete this section for their apps by July 20, and will need to provide updates if they change their data handling practices, too.
That sounds encouraging. Google’s been at the data harvesting combine controls for more than two decades. Now app developers have to provide information about their use of an app user’s data and presumably flip on the yellow fog lights for what the folks who have access to those data via an API or a bulk transfer are doing. Amusing thought forced regulation after 240 months on the info highway.
However, what app users do with data is half of the story, maybe less. The interesting question to me is, “What does Google do with those data?”
The Data Safety initiative does not focus on the Google. Data Safety shifts the attention to app developers, presumably some of whom have crafty ideas. My interest is Google’s own data surfing; for example, ad diffusion, and my fave Snorkelization and synthetic “close enough for horseshoes” data. Real data may be to “real” for some purposes.
After a couple of decades, Google is taking steps toward a data destination. I just don’t know where that journey is taking people.
Stephen E Arnold, April 28, 2022
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