Is Books safe?
It collects a lot of your data itself.
Our take. Its own App Store privacy label declares Books links 8 categories of your data to your identity, including location, contact info, contacts and user content. It is owned by Google, an advertising company, so that data is available to Google. That collection, more than any outside tracker, is the story here.
Books links 8 categories of your data to you.
From the developer's own App Store privacy label. These are the kinds of data Books ties to your identity.
Owned by Google.
Where it sits among book.
Every one of these apps we have scanned, on the two measures above: third-party trackers it carries (across) and data it links to you on its own label (up). Toward the top right is more invasive.
Each dot is one book app. Books sits high on the left: it collects a lot itself but uses few outside trackers.
How we know this
Counterspy downloads the app from the App Store and statically analyzes its compiled binary. Embedded SDKs are matched against a signature database and resolved to the company that operates each. We also read the developer's App Store privacy label, which lists the data the app says it collects and links to you. We do not run the app or intercept its traffic, so we report capabilities present in the code and the developer's own disclosures, not proven transmission. We assess privacy and data collection, not malware, security flaws, or developer intent. Reports are automated and never edited for payment. Scan v26.318.0, 2026-04-04.
- Third-party trackers are advertising, analytics and attribution SDKs detected by static signature matching. Presence shows a capability is compiled in, not that it ran or transmitted data.
- "Data the app links to you" is the count of data categories the developer declares as Data Linked To You in its App Store privacy label. Labels are self-reported and not verified by Apple.
- Comparison across the 82 book in our corpus. Trackers: median 5. Data linked to you: median 3.