Google Checks: Simplifying Privacy Compliance

Let’s imagine a scenario. You spent months creating a feature, and you uploaded it to stores. You were sleeping peacefully, and suddenly you get an email that your app was rejected due to privacy issues. Ever happened to you?

Published in

Google Developer Experts

4 min readAug 3, 2024

Copyright of the owner. Image taken from https://checks.google.com

Google Checks is one of Google’s products that helps us to check whether our app complies with privacy regulations and maintains user trust in today’s digital landscape.

Checks evaluate an app by comparing its declared, expected, and actual behaviour using various signals such as privacy policies and SDK analyses. The Checks dashboard provides a summary of the weekly analyses performed on our apps.

Checks identify potential privacy issues, offer actionable recommendations, monitor compliance status, and present results in an intuitive dashboard or integrate them directly into our CI/CD pipeline (GitLab is not supported yet). Utilizing artificial intelligence and machine learning, Checks scans apps to detect potential privacy and data protection violations and suggests remediation steps. This automated approach is more efficient than manual reviews. Checks leverage Google’s large language models and app understanding technologies to identify issues and provide fixing suggestions.

How Checks Works

Privacy Policy and SDK Analysis:

Privacy Policy Review: Checks evaluate the app’s declared behaviour by examining its privacy policy and other related documentation.
SDK Analysis: It analyzes the SDKs (and our flutter packages) integrated into the app to understand their data collection and sharing practices.

Automated Regular Analysis:

Data Collection and Sharing: These analyses help determine what data the app may be collecting or sharing, including data shared by SDKs, data requested through in-app permissions, and information shared to external sites.

Compliance Checks:

Signals and Indicators: Checks use dozens of signals, including privacy policies, permissions requested, SDK behaviours, and more, to determine if the app’s practices align with its declared policies.
AI and ML: Artificial intelligence and machine learning models are used to scan apps to identify potential privacy and data protection violations.

Reporting and Recommendations:

Dashboard: The Checks dashboard provides a summary of the weekly analyses, flagging high-priority issues that need immediate attention and other potential issues and opportunities for improvement.
Data Monitoring Page: This page provides detailed insights into the app’s data-sharing practices and highlights any discrepancies or concerns.

Integration with CI/CD:

Continuous Monitoring: Checks can be integrated into the Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) pipeline, allowing for ongoing compliance monitoring as part of the development workflow.

Benefits of Adding Checks

Enhanced Privacy Compliance:

Automated Monitoring: Checks provide automated and regular analysis of our app, ensuring continuous monitoring of privacy and data protection compliance.
Actionable Insights: It identifies potential privacy issues and offers actionable recommendations, helping us address compliance issues proactively.

Regulatory Adherence:

GDPR and CCPA Compliance: For apps that need to comply with regulations like GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) or CCPA (California Consumer Privacy Act), Checks can be invaluable in ensuring that our app meets these strict requirements.

User Trust and Transparency:

Building Trust: By using Checks, we can demonstrate to our users that we are serious about protecting their data and privacy, which can build trust and improve user retention.
Transparency: The Data Monitoring page provides clear insights into our app’s data-sharing practices, promoting transparency with our users.

Efficiency and Integration:

Seamless Integration: Checks can be integrated into our CI/CD pipeline (not yet with GitLab, though), making compliance checks a natural part of our development workflow without requiring significant additional effort.
Time and Resource Savings: The automation of compliance checks can save time and resources compared to manual reviews.

Integration Process

We just need to register our app with checks, the same way we register on Playstore and can run the checks. Because the CI/CD for GitLab is not available, we will have to manually upload the build to checks or else integrate its API somehow. We can also connect it with Slack so that any possible issues caught by Checks can be notified to us on Slack. Reports can also be generated.