Comparing Privacy Label Disclosures of Apps Published in both the App Store and Google Play Stores

Apple and Android introduced privacy labels in 2020 and 2022 respectively as a way of providing consumers with succinct summaries of mobile apps’ more salient data practices. A number of apps are published in both stores, offering us the opportunity to compare their privacy label disclosures in the two app stores. This paper compares the data practices privacy labels are intended to capture in each store. It then proceeds to analyze the disclosures of 822 apps published in both app stores, focusing on possible discrepancies. This analysis reveals that privacy label disclosures of what is ostensibly the same mobile app can be quite different. We discuss the different possible reasons behind these differences, including the possibility that these discrepancies might be indicative of potential privacy compliance issues. In particular, focusing on data collection disclosures of five different data types (location, contact info, sensitive info, identifiers, and health & fitness) we find discrepancies between iOS and Google Play privacy label disclosures in 66.5% of the mobile apps we analyze.