January 22, 2021

Privacy.

At the end of last year Apple introduced “privacy information labels” on all their apps in the apps store. I talked about this back in December and listed the contents of the Facebook app privacy disclosure on iOS. If you take a peek at that blog entry, you’ll be horrified at the amount of information Facebook tries to scrape from your iPhone.

The “Data Not Collected” image you see above is the same type of disclosure for my Twitter client of choice, Twitterrific. Twitter allows third party apps to access the Twitter platform, so you can use the app of your choice to Tweet. Unfortunately, Twitter also limits what the third party applications can do, so I don’t get the full Twitter experience by using Twitterrific.

And I am perfectly fine with that.

If I need to see my Twitter follower counts or report a tweet for bad behavior by the account owner, I can easily go to the official Twitter website to take care of business. Otherwise, Twitterrific lets me safely and easily tweet, reply to tweets, and read tweets in chronological order. I love it and highly recommend it.

Best part? Twitterrific scrapes absolutely ZERO information from my iPhone. Highly recommended.

When you’re looking at new apps, please take a moment to look at how the app handles the data and what information it pulls from your device. A television does not scan the viewer to tailor ads specifically for your TV and seems to do just fine at shilling products through commercials. There’s no reason for an Internet ad company to scrape all of your information just to personalize ads for you.

You’re better than that.

Take a gander at the information disclosures in the App Store. Make smart choices and give your privacy the respect it deserves.