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

Three weeks after Google promised to add mandatory privacy labels for Apple apps “as early as this week,” none of the company’s top apps have the labels, including Gmail, search, photos, documents and YouTube.

There have been some doubts about whether Google is not purposely updating its apps to avoid labels, so I looked at each Google app on the iOS App Store to find out if updates are coming.

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

• Stadia
• Google translator
• Google Authenticator
• Google Play Movies & TV
• Google Classroom
• Google Fiber
• Google Fiber TV
• Wear OS
• Onduo for Diabetes
• Project Baseline
• Google Smart Lock
• Motion Stills – GIF, collage

By clicking on the privacy labels, they seem to make sense. Some of the applications, like Google Authenticator, do not capture much information, while Google Translate and Classroom have a very robust list of privacy notices.

Again, this does not necessarily mean that Google is capturing all of this information only when opening the application. The privacy label shows only all the things that the app May capture depending on what features you use. And while you may have to scroll through the list a bit, it’s nothing like Facebook’s seemingly endless list.

There are some curiosities, however. “Motion Stills – GIF, Collage” is an application that has not been updated for three years, but has privacy labels. It is probably fair to say that this was not the application we had in mind when Google promised that it would start implementing them.

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

Google denied that although, explicitly saying TechCrunch that it was not preventing updates and that it was committed to adding labels when those updates were ready. The company reiterated that promise in a blog post focusing on privacy on January 12:

As Google’s iOS apps are updated with new features or to fix bugs, you’ll see updates on our list of app pages that include the new App Privacy Details. These labels represent the maximum categories of data that can be collected – that is, if you use all the features and services available in the application.

They are being launched. It’s just not clear when Google will update its most popular applications – those that are likely to absorb more user data, anyway.