Tips for Developers Who Need to Create a Privacy Policy for Their Applications

When a service is handling sensitive data from the customer, it is important for the user to know exactly what is being done with that information. For Android, this can be anything from access to your location data, contact list, or even requesting access to certain permissions (like the microphone, camera, etc). Back in December, Google implemented a new rule that required developers to actually come up with their own privacy policy if their application handled this sensitive data.

At the time, Google hadn't started enforcing the new rule as there are still millions of applications and games which do not have a valid privacy policy. However, emails started going out to developers recently that stated Google would be taking action next month on the 15th of March. This has made many people worried because they've likely never come up with their own privacy policy in the past and they don't want to have the visibility of their application or game limited because of it.

Thankfully, an Android developer by the name of Ali Muzaffar has created a post up on Medium that offers some tips and suggestions for those who need help in this area. After discussing what is happening, he talks about going to PrivacyPolicyTemplate.net and generating a basic template for a valid privacy policy. Mr. Muzaffar takes this one step further too and modifies it for Android applications while leaving certain parts blank for the developer to fill out for their own application or game.

Many developers don't own their own website either and this has left them wondering where they can host this new privacy policy too (since Google is just asking developers to link to it). So Mr. Muzaffar has also suggested that the developer can use GitHub to host the document with the help of RawGit to generate a URL for it. This will then display the file as an HTML file and can be linked in both the application as well as the Google Play Developer Console.

Source: @ali.muzaffar

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