Hey this is the daily overpass. My name is Eric and I make apps. Now today, I want
to talk about the Google Play privacy policy and the advertising ID.
All right, so today, I want to talk very quickly about a problem a lot of
developers have been having the last couple of days, with having their apps removed
from Google Play because they don't have a valid privacy policy in place . Now I
first heard about this a couple of days ago from Rodrigo who's been doing some
work with our team. Rodrigo Graça, he's always in the comments, he's always on
the live streams and he sent me this email that he got where he had all of
his apps removed from Google Play, but because he didn't have a valid privacy
policy in place. He wasn't doing anything sensitive so
previously if you did anything like collecting information, or video, or audio,
or camera, you needed to have a privacy policy in place to say what you're
doing with that data, but all he was doing was was showing ads. So he got this
email here, which says that issue violation of usage of Android advertising ID and
section 4.8 or the developer distribution agreement blah blah blah.
It says if your app collects the Android advertising ID you must provide
a valid privacy policy in both the designated feel in the play console and
from within the app, so, he went through and made those changes and had them back.
It was a removal and not a suspension, so that you could always just go through
and fix that. However this is something that I haven't really heard of before,
whereas the advertising ID is is the cause of that that removal. Now the truth
is, I've already put privacy policies in place for all of my apps last year,
because I got an email back in February of 2017, where I got a similar thing,
saying because I have some sort of policy I think it was allowing them to. I
think I was accessing the phone state so that we could pause the game if they got
a phone call or something like that, and because I had that in there, I had to
have a privacy policy and I got an email like this saying action required
provided a link to a valid privacy policy statement on your website
and also included it within the app. So we did it in two places. We did it on the
privacy policy place, the privacy policy field on Google Play console and also
within the app and you know some people even put it in the description of the
app but that's the the all the places we did. And I've been
asked whether or not we have one for each different app and no, for me I
just have one privacy policy for all applications where I don't refer to a
specific app in general but I do refer to all the things that we do. So most of
the time is just collecting ads and doing analytics firebase analytics and
Google Analytics or different types of apps so that's what we've done. So I
think this is one of the reasons I haven't been affected yet, either that or
I'm gonna get hit with it eventually because something's missing somewhere,
but that's something that we did. It's getting to the point now where you
should probably start thinking about putting a privacy policy in place,
regardless of what you do, just so you don't get suspended in the future. So
like I said, this is something that hasn't affected me, but I wanted to let
you guys know about it in case it does affect you in the future.
Now Rodrigo was also saying that he went to a URL called free
privacy policy dot-com and he said did you use that? He said oh I
looked at your privacy policy you're using the free policy.com2 and I said no,
actually I paid like a hundred pounds for our privacy policy and it's the same
results as you can get from that. So I'm gonna include a link to that in the
description too and let me know if you've been affected by this because
it's that changing landscape of things going. To be honest with you putting the
privacy policy in the Google Play console, that's no big deal, you don't
have to go through and put it in there. It's putting in the app and
redistributing the app, that's kind of a hassle. So what we do is on our settings
page or our about page, whichever one it is some different apps just have a
little link in there saying privacy policy so it takes them out of the app
into the web page if they do. So that's how we're handling this at the moment so
I haven't been hit by it yet, but let me know if you've been hit by it and if you
don't have a policy privacy policy in place and you serve ads, just know that
this is something that could be coming and just to watch out for it. It's
like I said, it's it's a removal it's not a suspension. It's not like
they're saying you're doing anything wrong, it's just you have to go through and
resubmit it. Anyway, let me know how it's affecting you or if it's affecting
you and that is it for today. I'll talk to you guys again tomorrow.