Mobile Apps: What Does The CNIL Recommend From A Privacy Perspective?

Summary

While mobile apps have become one of the major means of access to digital services, their ubiquity is accompanied by significant risks to users' privacy, due to the massive amount of personal data they collect and process. Last September the Commission Nationale de l'Informatique et des Libertés (CNIL) published a set of recommendations to improve compliance of mobile apps with data protection rules. These clarify the obligations of the various stakeholders and set out best practices in the mobile app ecosystem. The recommendations are structured to distinguish between requirements which are mandatory and those which are best practice and are arranged by category of the entity involved in the mobile app value chain, with practical checklists for assessing and documenting compliance. We unpack the key recommendations by the five main categories: