Reading an App Store privacy label
Every App Store listing has a privacy label, and most people never scroll far enough to see it. Here is what each section means, what the words "collect" and "track" mean to Apple, and what the label cannot tell you.
Scroll down any App Store listing, past the screenshots and the reviews, and you will find a section called App Privacy. It is a short summary of what data the app gathers and what it is used for, and Apple has required it for new apps and updates since December 2020.
It is genuinely useful. It is also easy to misread, because a few of its words have narrower meanings than they do in ordinary speech.
The four sections
A label is made up of some or all of these:
Data Used to Track You. The most serious category. Data here is used to follow you across apps and websites owned by other companies, usually for advertising.
Data Linked to You. Data the developer collects that is connected to your identity — through an account, a device identifier, an email address or similar.
Data Not Linked to You. Data the developer collects but says it keeps separate from your identity — typically anonymised crash reports or aggregate usage figures.
Data Not Collected. The developer declares it collects nothing at all from the app.
Tap See Details to see each section broken down into categories — Contact Info, Location, Contacts, User Content, Identifiers, Usage Data, Diagnostics and so on — and, for each, the purposes it is used for, such as App Functionality, Analytics or Third-Party Advertising.
What "collect" means
This is the word that trips people up.
In Apple's definition, data is collected when it is transmitted off the device in a way that lets the developer or its partners access it for longer than is needed to serve the request in real time.
So an app that processes your photographs entirely on your device is not collecting them, however much it does with them. And an app that sends your location to a server only to fetch the local weather, and discards it immediately, may not be collecting it either.
The label is about what leaves your device and is kept. It says nothing about what an app can see while it runs.
What "tracking" means
Tracking, in Apple's sense, means linking data from this app with data from other companies' apps, websites or offline sources for targeted advertising or measurement — or sharing it with a data broker.
An app that shows you its own recommendations based on your own history inside it is not tracking. An app that sends your email address to an ad network so it can match you with your browsing elsewhere is.
Tracking on iPhone and iPad also requires the App Tracking Transparency prompt — the "Ask App Not to Track" dialog. If a label lists tracking, you should expect to see that prompt.
Third parties count
A developer must declare what its third-party code collects as well — analytics SDKs, advertising SDKs, crash reporters, login providers. "We don't collect that, our analytics provider does" is not an allowed excuse.
Since 2024 Apple has also required commonly used SDKs to ship a privacy manifest describing their own data use, which makes it harder for a developer to be unaware of what an embedded library does.
What the label cannot tell you
It is self-reported. Apple reviews apps and can act on a label that is shown to be false, but it does not audit every app's network traffic before publishing. The label is the developer's statement.
There are narrow exemptions. Data collected rarely, optionally, clearly under your control and not used for tracking or advertising — a feedback form you choose to fill in, for example — may be left off.
It says nothing about the website or service behind the app. A companion web service has its own privacy policy, and the label covers the app.
It does not describe permissions. An app that asks for your Contacts or Input Monitoring and keeps everything on the device can honestly say "Data Not Collected". That is a true statement about transmission, not a statement about access.
It lags. A label is updated with a new version of the app. A policy change between releases may not be reflected yet.
How to use it
Three quick checks cover most decisions:
- Any "Data Used to Track You"? For a utility with no advertising, there is rarely a good reason.
- Does "Data Linked to You" match the features? An app with accounts will link an email address. An offline calculator that links your location has some explaining to do.
- Do the purposes fit the app? Third-Party Advertising in an app with no ads suggests an SDK the developer may not have thought about.
Then, for the things the label cannot show, look at the permissions the app asks for and — on a Mac — at what the app is entitled to do.
How ours read
Every app we publish except one — RenameDeck, Ziploom, ClackSmith, Compact Contacts, Miyu Paint and Garfi, and the iPhone and iPad companions of the last three — carries the same label: Data Not Collected. Each one does its work on the device, with no app account, advertising or third-party analytics, so there is nothing to declare.
AI on Radar is the exception, because it is a news app backed by a web service. Its label lists Data Linked to You — a device identifier and other data, used for app functionality — and Data Not Linked to You — search history and product interaction, also for app functionality. No section lists tracking. That is what a label should look like for an app of that shape: short, and matched to features you can see.
Every one of those labels carries Apple's own line that the information "has not been verified by Apple". On a Mac you can check a stronger claim than any label makes. Sandboxed apps declare their entitlements, and one of them is network access. The Mac App Store sandbox piece shows how to read an app's entitlements yourself. RenameDeck, for instance, has no network entitlement at all — it could not send your filenames anywhere even if it wanted to. That is the kind of statement worth looking for, because the system enforces it rather than the developer promising it.