Google To Roll Back App Permissions List On Play Store
Alphabet-owned search engine technology giant, Google, has announced that it will be rolling back the app permissions list on the Play Store. The company had initially announced that it would replace the app permissions list with Data Safety labels.
The tech giant, however, did not specify when the permission section will be back on the Play Store, according to a report by TechCrunch. "Privacy and transparency are core values in the Android community. We heard your feedback that you find the app permissions section in Google Play useful, and we have decided to reinstate it. The app permissions section will be back shortly," Android Developers wrote on Twitter.
"The Data safety section provides users with a simplified view of how an app collects, shares, & secures user data, but we also want to make app permissions information easily viewable for users to understand an app's ability to access specific restricted data and actions too," the twitter handle added.
Google launched the Data Safety labels on Play Store in April after announcing them last year at Google's I/O conference.
Rival company, Apple, on the other hand, launched its own data privacy labels in 2020, showing what data an app can collect from people. As Google was rolling out the Data Safety label across apps over the last few months, several blogs and researchers noted that Google also removed the permissions section, allowing one to see what kind of data access an app has on your phone from the Play Store.
Earlier in the month, Google confirmed it removed the permissions section from the Play Store on July 13, but it did not say why it had been removed. The tech giant said it is being reinstated based on the feed from the Android community but did not elaborate on why it was removed in the first place.
Users could still go to the apps menu on their phone and check out permissions for the individual app, but would not be reflected on the install page of Google's app store. The new change will let them see both Data Safety labels and app permissions directly from the Play Store.
