Google’s most popular iPhone apps have gone weeks without mandatory privacy labels or updates

Three weeks after Google promised that Apple would add a mandatory privacy label from Apple ‘as soon as this week’, none of the company’s major apps have the labels, including Gmail, search, Photos, Docs and YouTube.

There were some questions about whether Google was deliberately not updating its programs to avoid the labels. So I checked every Google app in the iOS App Store to find out if the updates were installed.

Some have: 12 apps now have iOS privacy labels, though they may not be as recognizable as YouTube or Gmail:

• Stadium
• Google Translate
• Google Authenticator
• Google Play Movies & TV
• Google Classroom
• Google fiber
• Google Fiber TV
• Drag OS
• Onduo for diabetes
• Baseline Project
• Google Smart Lock
• Motion Stills – GIF, Collage

When you look at the privacy labels, it makes sense. Some of the programs, like Google Authenticator, do not store much information, while Google Translate and Classroom have a solid list of privacy notices.

Again, this does not necessarily mean that Google catches everyone of the information just after you open the app. The privacy tag only shows all the things the app contains may capture depending on what features you use. And while you may have to scroll through the list, it’s nothing like Facebook’s seemingly endless list.

There are some oddities though. “Motion Stills – GIF, Collage” is an app that has not been updated for three years, but still has the privacy labels. It’s probably fair to say that this was not the app we had in mind when Google promised it would start rolling them out.

Apple released these privacy labels on December 14th, and companies like Google can no longer update their apps unless they first add the privacy labels. So when some people realized that Google had stopped updating its programs, they speculated that it might be possible to avoid having to acknowledge how much data it was collecting.

Google has denied this, although it is explicitly stated TechCrunch that it does not hold back updates and that he is committed to adding the labels when the updates are ready. The company repeated the promise in a privacy blog on January 12:

As Google’s iOS apps are updated with new features or to fix bugs, you’ll see updates to the list of app pages that contain the new app’s privacy information. These labels represent the maximum categories of data that can be collected – that is, if you use every available feature and service in the app.

They are rolling out. It’s just not clear when Google will update its most popular apps – the ones that are likely to absorb the most user data.