I remember a lot of apps, like GMail, WhatsApp, and Discord being really, really, cartoonishly awful in how much data they collected on users, according to the App Privacy labels on the App Store. Looking back at those apps, their privacy labels look way shorter than I remember, and the super egregious things they collected are gone. Is that an actual thing that happened, or just a mistake of my memory?
I think there’s a genuine attempt by software vendors to make their apps more private, we saw Discord recently make calls E2EE for example. There’s also increasingly tighter and more granular permissions in operating systems making it harder for apps to harvest data from you in the first place. Generally I think there’s a positive trend toward user privacy overall.
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My cynical take is that while the Apps themselves have become shy with gathering copiously unreasonable amounts of personal data, the base OS (Apple and Google) continuously gathers private data surreptitiously. So I’m willing to bet that the amount of data gathered has not changed, just siloed to the top tier players of advertising.
Also I have a theory, that some of the data they were collecting turned out to be useless, or less in demand by the organizations they sell them to. If targeted ads become seen as less effective, if people use adblocker more often, then I presume there will be less incentive to collect this much data.
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