How to fill in Apple's App Privacy details
The labels on your App Store page come from a questionnaire, not from your privacy policy. It is the Apple half of the same job the Google Play data safety form does, and the two are checked against different things.
What this is
The labels on your App Store page come from a questionnaire, not from your privacy policy. It is the Apple half of the same job the Google Play data safety form does, and the two are checked against different things.
Step by step
- Open App Store Connect, pick the app, and go to App Privacy. It sits on the app level, not on a version.
- List every SDK in the build first. Each one you ship answers for you whether you declare it or not.
- For each data type, say whether it is collected, whether it is linked to the user, and whether it is used to track them across other companies' apps.
- Tracking is the one to read twice: it is what turns on the App Tracking Transparency prompt, and declaring it without asking is a rejection.
- Save, then read the labels as they will appear and check each one against what the privacy policy says.
One thing people miss
The labels are published whether or not anybody reads your policy, so they are the version of your privacy story most people will ever see. They also outlive a release: they stay as entered until you change them, which is how an app ends up advertising a data type it stopped collecting two versions ago.
Keeping it true after launch
A legal page stops being true the moment the product moves past it, usually by adding a payment provider, an analytics SDK or a sign-in. No store re-checks your pages against your build, so the drift is yours to notice.
- Re-read it whenever you add a dependency that sees user data.
- Re-check what loads on the page after any change: the cookie notice and the policy have to agree.
- Keep the URL stable. Changing where a policy lives breaks every listing that points at it.
Common questions
How long does this take?
Minutes, once the page it points at exists. The writing is the slow part, not the form.
Can I change it later?
Yes, and you should whenever the app changes. What you want to avoid is changing the URL, because everything that points at it breaks.