In the wake of the US Supreme Court's decision to end women's constitutional right to abortion, privacy advocates are applauding the closing of a loophole that allowed thousands of companies to monitor and sell sensitive personal data from mobile devices.
It also took a further step on Friday to limit the risk of the data being used to police new abortion restrictions, announcing it would automatically remove the location history on phones that have been near an abortion clinic.
There are fears that mobile apps will be used by US states to police new abortion restrictions.
In the past, companies have sold information on the open market, including lists of users of family planning and period tracking apps.
Over the past week, privacy researchers and advocates have called for women to stop using period- tracking apps on their phones.
The feature, which allows developers to see which other apps are installed and deleted, was restricted by the tech giant. The change was supposed to be implemented last summer, but the company didn't meet the deadline due to the swine flu.
The new deadline will be on July 12th, just weeks after the ruling of the Supreme Court of the United States on the legality of abortion.
It has been a long time since it was finally done. Data brokers have been banned from using the data for a long time, but not built safeguards into the approval process to catch this behavior. The loophole has been investigated by a cyber security researcher since 2020.
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In March 2021, we announced that we would restrict access to this permission so that only utility apps could see what other apps were installed on a phone.
It said that collecting app inventory data to sell it or share it for other purposes has never been allowed on the platform.
Despite widespread usage by app developers, users are not aware of the feature in their software. It allows apps, or snippets of third-party code inside them, to query the inventory of all other apps on a person's phone It has been found that this type of data is being sold to third parties.
App inventories can be used to deduce end users interests, including gender, race and marital status, according to researchers.
One data marketplace, Narrative.io, was openly selling data obtained by other people in this way.
Narrative removed pregnancy tracking and menstruation app data from its platform in May in response to a leaked Supreme Court decision.
A research company discovered that consumer apps, like a simple weather app, were running bits of code that exploited the sameAndroid feature and were harvesting data for a Panamanian company with ties to US defense contractors.
The sale of user data by developers is against the rules of the play. It had several companies that were believed to be selling user data.
From July 12th, the feature will only be available to those who need it. It will be necessary for app developers to fill out a declaration explaining why they need access before the deadline so that it can be checked.
The company warned that deceptive and undeclared uses of these permission may result in a suspension of your app.
Richard Waters reports additional information.
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