WhatsApp has claimed that Apple’s “mandatory” App Store privacy nutrition labels may scare away people from using its app while giving its own first-party apps like iMessage that come pre-installed on all iPhones, an unfair advantage. In statements given out to Axios, a WhatsApp spokesperson said “while providing people with easy to read information is a good start,” Apple’s approach did not “reflect the strong measures apps may take to protect people’s private information.”
As part of Apple’s new App Store guidelines—first announced during WWDC 2020 in June—all developers must submit details about the kind of data they collect on users. Since there is no one common standard here, Apple has come out with broad-based terms such as “user data” and “identifiers” for developers. In line with this requirement, WhatsApp has…