How to Find Privacy Shortcuts for All Your Apple Apps
Apple is now forcing companies to use its new privacy labels, introduced in December 2020, if they intend to continue offering updated versions of their apps in the App Store. And that goes for Apple’s own apps as well.
If you’d like to check out Apple’s own data collection policy, you can check out its giant privacy review . However, if you just want to know about the data collection policies for some of its apps, there is an easier way to view Apple’s privacy shortcuts for its own apps than to go to the App Store and view each one individually.
Instead, visit the Labels section of Apple’s privacy page and you’ll see all the privacy labels for everything Apple does for iOS, iPadOS, macOS, tvOS, or watchOS. Yes, the list is pretty impressive – 103. (I counted.)
In each application, you will receive one of two fields: one indicates that Apple is collecting data from you, but does not associate it with you, and the other indicates that Apple is collecting data that may be associated with you.
If you’d like to take a deeper look at the data that Apple siphons from your apps and uses, click the little More Info link in the upper-right corner for a more detailed understanding of Apple’s data collection methods:
Apple is not specifying how to configure privacy settings for each of these apps, or whether you can do so on your specific operating system. I recommend digging into your OS’s privacy settings to see what you can tweak, whether it’s setting up services and permissions for apps or opening individual apps to see what they’re allowed to do on your device.
Also, don’t forget Apple’s general privacy and tracking settings if you want to anonymize yourself as much as possible on your device (for example, to set up location services and analytics permissions). You might not be able to specifically prevent, say, the Files app from sharing anonymous usage data with Apple, but generally you can restrict the analytics your device sends. With any luck, your settings will cover all the apps you searched for on Apple’s list.