Apple, over the past few days, has been criticized by many for cracking down on third party apps that monitored a user’s screen time and some specifics of the device usage as well. It was again perceived as the big tech giant stomping on the honest little app developers trying to give Apple’s own Screen Time app a run for its money. Evil vs good, then? Well, Apple has clarified in great detail why it chose to crack down on third party apps that were monitoring and logging how you use your iPhone or iPad and adding parental controls. Privacy. Privacy of your data.
“We recently removed several parental control apps from the App Store, and we did it for a simple reason: they put users’ privacy and security at risk. It’s important to understand why and how this happened,” says Apple in an official statement.
This comes after a report that Apple had either asked certain screen management and parental control apps to alter how they operate, or had booted them from the App Store completely. “Apple has removed or restricted at least 11 of the 17 most downloaded screen-time and parental-control apps,” the report in The Times stated. The direct comparison was with Apple’s own Screen Time app, which is a part of the latest iOS software for iPhones and iPads—and there was a belief that some of the third party apps provided better tools for parents to monitor and eventually block their child’s usage of an iOS device if needed.
“Over the last year, we became aware that several of these parental control apps were using a highly invasive technology called Mobile Device Management, or MDM. MDM gives a third party control and access over a device and its most sensitive information including user location, app use, email accounts, camera permissions, and browsing history. We started exploring this use of MDM by non-enterprise developers back in early 2017 and updated our guidelines based on that work in mid-2017,” says Apple.
While MDM is used by enterprises on the devices they own to better control the devices on the network, it is a violation of the App Store policies for consumer apps to install MDM on a consumer’s device.
The report had also claimed that the developers whose apps had been removed from the App Store were clueless about the reasons. Apple refutes that, “When we found out about these guideline violations, we communicated these violations to the app developers, giving them 30 days to submit an updated app to avoid availability interruption in the App Store. Several developers released updates to bring their apps in line with these policies. Those that didn’t were removed from the App Store.”
Surely we haven’t heard the last of this saga.
Comments
0 comment