Worrying confessions: A look at data safety labels on Android

The Google Play Store recently introduced a data safety section in order to give users accessible insights into apps’ data collection practices. We analyzed the labels of 43,927 of the most popular apps. Almost one third of the apps with a label claims not to collect any data. But we also saw popular apps, including apps meant for children, admitting to collecting and sharing highly sensitive data like the user’s sexual orientation or health information for tracking and advertising purposes. To verify the declarations, we recorded the network traffic of 500 apps, finding more than one quarter of them transmitting tracking data not declared in their data safety label.

This data set contains a dump of our database, including the top chart data and data safety labels from September 07, 2022, and the recorded network traffic.

The analysis is available at our blog: https://www.datarequests.org/blog/android-data-safety-labels-analysis/
The source code for the analysis is available on GitHub: https://github.com/datenanfragen/android-data-safety-label-analysis