It is a requirement of both Android and iOS app stores to have a policy prominently displayed for users.
This. Although I’m not sure if it’s about in-app display, but it needs to be on the store and on a website somewhere.
The default Samsung Calculator doesn’t display a privacy policy (or any menu options really) in-app, but you can find them as a link at the bottom of the ‘See Details’ page under ‘Data Saftey’ on the play store. Annoyingly, it’s just a generic set of terms that covers most of their products/services. That document says they collect and share all sorts of data, but the store page for the calculator say no data collected.
This is why privacy policies are a virtue signaling joke. They all start with “we respect your privacy” which is so objectively, categorically, false 99% of the time that it should be considered illegal (e.g. false advertising) for the org to even associate those words with their business, in any capacity. Every evilcorp has one policy that is hundreds of pages long and covers everything they ever have done, and ever will do, across every subsidiary and product of the entire umbrella organization. The whole privacy policy system is designed so every consumer rubber stamps them and legally absolves the corporation for everything they will ever do, because it’s impossible for any human to read or understand them. By impossible I mean literally impossible – you would need more than a lifetime to read them, let alone comprehend them…
If we didn’t live in a capitalist dystopia, privacy policies wouldn’t be needed most of the time, because data laws qould be so comprehensive they explicitly apply for 99% of interactions, and every system would be designed from the ground up for zero trust (e.g. all data is E2EE). But in the 1% of cases where they are needed they’re dynamically generated from templates, based on a users current preferences/settings. The “use X app” policy would be different from the “integrate all of my other various PII linked services to my account” policy. In the case of a completely offline calculator, with no API, and no telemetry/analytics (or them all disabled by default) the policy would not even be a link; just a one-liner that says “App can be used with zero data collection”. If you download the app and choose to enable a data collection setting, that’s when you would be shown the policy related to the specific data points that setting relates to.
It’s Apple Review Guideline 5.1.1:
(i) Privacy Policies: All apps must include a link to their privacy policy in the App Store Connect metadata field and within the app in an easily accessible manner…
For Android it’s in their User Data article:
Privacy Policy All apps must post a privacy policy link in the designated field within Play Console, and a privacy policy link or text within the app itself…
This is just talking about developers having to include a link to their privacy policy in the respective field in the App Store/Play Store
A privacy policy can be “we don’t collect your data.”
A privacy policy could literally say “our policy is to track and store nothing”. Having one does not make it evil.
In the case of Google, I would not be surprised if it stays running in the background using a relatively large amount ram just for fun.
In this case, it redirects to Google’s general privacy policy that covers all their services. Anyway Google’s calculator stores a history of all the calculations you did in your account somewhere. So I guess it needs to have a policy stating what they do with that data.
It’s shit like this that makes me want to never use another Google app or service.
What possible justification is there for storing history of calculations in a calculator app?
I’m not saying I agree with their justification but I could see why they might be collecting yet another data point: education level. If someone constantly uses a calculator for simple calculations they might have a low education level. People in that demographic will be served different ads than more educated people.
It sucks, but I could see Google doing that.
Crash reporting, probably.
Tap for spoiler
They gonna rat you out to the feds if you divide by zero.
It’s got your number.