Through reading Actions on Google documentation, I found that to access user storage to store data there, obtaining consent is required in some countries. So my question is where are these countries?? Nothing was specifically detailed so I thought it might have made developers think too.
According to Actions on Google: Save Data in Conversation oogle:
Legal note: Obtaining consent prior to accessing userStorage. Some countries have regulations that require developers to obtain consent from the user before they can access, or save certain information (e.g. personal information) in the userStorage. If you operate in one of these countries and you want to access, or save such information in userStorage, you must use the Confirmation helper to ask consent to the user and obtain the consent before you can start storing such information in userStorage.
There are certain laws like GDPR, applying to European Union countries, which create standards for storing user data. Though other countries may have their own laws. I'm not a lawyer, and getting legal counsel is ideal in discussing legal matters for each country to launch your action.
Otherwise you can set up your action to always get consent ahead of time regardless of location, which isn't a substitute for legal counsel but would fit in the requirement outlined in the documentation.
Related
I am working on a project dealing with Swift and HealthKit and my team and I are wondering if given permission by a user, are we allowed to store HealthKit data externally in a database? I have looked through the documentation for HealthKit and didn't really find anything unless I overlooked it. Any help would be appreciated!
There is plenty of information in the guidelines and the documentation
Here are some highlights...
The guidelines state
Privacy Protection
You must request permission to access people's data, and you must take all necessary steps to protect that data. After you receive permission, it's essential to maintain people's trust by clearly showing them how you use their data. For developer guidance, see Protecting User Privacy.
Provide a coherent privacy policy. During the app submission process, you must provide a URL to a clearly stated privacy policy, so that people can view the policy when they click the link in the App Store page for your app. For developer guidance, see App Information > App Store Connect Help.
Request access to health data only when you need it. It makes sense to request access to weight information when people log their weight, for example, but not immediately after your app launches. When your request is clearly related to the current context, you help people understand your app’s intentions. Also, people can change the permissions they grant, so your app should make a request every time it needs access. For developer guidance, see requestAuthorization(toShare:read:completion:).
Clarify your app's intent by adding descriptive messages to the standard permission screen. People expect to see the system-provided permission screen when asked to approve access to health data. Write a few succinct sentences that explain why you need the information and how people can benefit from sharing it with your app. Avoid adding custom screens that replicate the standard permission screen’s behavior or content.
https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guidelines/healthkit/overview/
Another thing to note
The user’s device stores all HealthKit data locally. For security, the device encrypts the HealthKit store when the user locks the device. As a result, your app may not be able to read data from the store when it runs in the background. However, your app can still write to the store, even when the phone is locked. HealthKit temporarily caches the data and saves it to the encrypted store as soon as the user unlocks the phone.
Specify How Your App Uses the Health Data
In addition, your app must not access the HealthKit APIs unless the app is primarily designed to provide health or fitness services. Your app’s role as a health and fitness service must be clear in both your marketing text and your user interface. Specifically, the following guidelines apply to all HealthKit apps:
Your app may not use information gained through the use of the HealthKit framework for advertising or similar services. Note that you may still serve advertising in an app that uses the HealthKit framework, but you can’t use data from the HealthKit store to serve ads.
You must not disclose any information gained through HealthKit to a third party without express permission from the user. Even with permission, you can only share information to a third party if they also provide a health or fitness service to the user.
You can’t sell information gained through HealthKit to advertising platforms, data brokers, or information resellers.
If the user consents, you may share their HealthKit data with a third party for medical research.
You must clearly disclose to the user how you and your app will use their HealthKit data.
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/healthkit/protecting_user_privacy
To match Apple's security you would have to encrypt the data and therefore you would likely have to comply with Federal Encryption Guidelines
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/security/complying_with_encryption_export_regulations
It takes a lot to do it "correctly"
Hi i create application that is common to youtube and i`ve got some questions. I use google login(oAuth), so i keep in my database all things required to use google APIs for every user that wants to log in. The question is if i can use(is it possible and legal) google analytics to get info(like gender of people which shows his/her video or age or region) about every user that is loged in to my application and show it to another users which using my application ?
edit:
I do not know if you understood me well, user log in to my app with his google account, i have in my database his google token, etc. In my application all users have got youtube account and now what i want to do is that if you are log in, you can see user`s statistics from youtube(like the gender of people who watch his/her video and what is thier age) for any user registered in my app. There is a youtube analyse api, which alow you to get your account stats, and if i have access to someone`s google account(i keep toke in my datbase), i couldnt just use it to request that analyse api for every user and in that way get access to their stats. And another question is if i get data in the way that i described(of course if it is possibe), is it legall, if i can display such an info to other users not only to the owner of the account?
Thanks for help
Is it legall, if i can display such an info to other users not only to the owner of the account? Thanks for help
If you are authenticating a user to get access to their Private data. It is your responsibility as a developer to ensure that their data remains private. You should not be sharing data between your users without there express permission.
If the data you are accessing is public then you are allowed to display that data with anyone.
Remember when you created your google developer console account you agreed to this Google APIs Terms of Service
b. Compliance with Law, Third Party Rights, and Other Google Terms of Service
You will comply with all applicable law, regulation, and third party rights (including without limitation laws regarding the import or export of data or software, privacy, and local laws). You will not use the APIs to encourage or promote illegal activity or violation of third party rights. You will not violate any other terms of service with Google (or its affiliates).
d. User Privacy and API Clients
You will comply with all applicable privacy laws and regulations including those applying to PII. You will provide and adhere to a privacy policy for your API Client that clearly and accurately describes to users of your API Client what user information you collect and how you use and share such information (including for advertising) with Google and third parties.
You may also want to read Privacy policy
I use the Dropbox Datastore in an app that uses both the iOS and JavaScript SDKs. Aside from the 10MB datastore limit, it works pretty well.
But nearly every support request I get makes me wish I could have access to the user's data for debugging. Being able to see exactly what the user sees helps me to find and fix bugs very quickly.
Is there any way for me to access a user's data without logging into their account? Can I maybe store their access token and gain access to just their Dropbox Datastore data?
This is one of the attractive things about Parse: you can see all user data. While there is a lot of wisdom in sharding user data across Dropbox user accounts, it makes app debugging crazy-hard.
Any ideas? What do you do to get around this?
Dropbox datastores, like files, are considered the user's private data, and as such there isn't a way for an arbitrary party to gain access to said data without some sort of authorization (e.g., access to the account, having the data explicitly shared with them, etc.) Likewise, even the developer of an API app that a user happens to be using doesn't automatically get access to the data.
That said, if, as the developer of the app, you want to troubleshoot using your user's data, the most straightforward method would probably be to get an access token for that app/user pair from the user. That would replicate their setup most accurately. (Unfortunately, the Sync/Datastore SDK doesn't make it easy to extract/insert arbitrary access tokens like that though. So, in that case, this would be a bit of work to build some flow to get an access token, e.g., a small web app, and then some work to read data directly from the API.)
Alternatively, you may want to make it possible for the user to share the datastore with your own account.
In any case, it's very important that the user not be misled or confused as to what is happening or what the developer is requesting. That means being clear with user with regards to what the developer is requesting and what will be done with the data. In addition, apps should provide privacy policies in general.
I'm making a application for facebook that will be used for academic research. Right now when the user goes to install the application I'll request additional information which is stated in the extended permissions.
I would perfectly understand someone not wanting to give out certain aspects of this information (It's just used to gather statistics about people taking part , education, religion etc.)
Does anyone know the best way to filter the permissions? For instance maybe someone is willing to give their age but not education. Therefore can I remove the education request from my application install request dynamically?
If you want to ask the user for only those permissions that he wants to give, you can take input from him before redirecting to Facebook login. You can generate the url for requesting permissions based on this custom set of permissions using the 'perms' attribute of the <fb:loginbutton /> tag or pass the list of permissions you want to the $facebook->getLoginUrl(array('req_perms' => $perms)) call.
To keep track of permission changes, you can use the realtime updates offered. You can know more about it here.
You certainly could build an up-front permissions matrix that the user could cherry-pick from. And that would probably be the way to do it, since you can't do anything to customize the permission challenge that the Facebook Platform generates.
The trick would be keeping track of which permissions the user granted in the given access token you'll receive from back from the Platform. Especially since users can change the permissions granted to your application w/o visiting the application itself - so you'll want to be hooked in to that info via the Real Time Updates.
Right now when I use Facebook's new OAuth2 system, it tells the user that my app is requesting to "Publish content to your Wall". How do I disable this (for fear of scaring off users), as I don't need this enabled. Possible?
Getting the user to authorize one of the extended permissions for your app is kind of the point behind authenticating. You may want to see if the data you need is exposed without authenticating (if you in fact need data). If you can get the uid you can see what is exposed to everyone, and per the privacy changes, I mean everyone. Until the privacy "fire", there was quite a bit exposed to everyone, now 'everyone' means the least restrictive tier among multiple privacy tiers rather than the happy-go-lucky default.
So really the question is, what permission are you trying to get?
There are a few unknown variables here such as what type of app you are making etc.
Check your code for one of the extended permissions, you are probably sending one of them such as offline_access in your auth call.