Business before pleasure...
Any app from any app store, including fruit flavoured ones collecting personal information should arguably be audited. This is information over and above that already collected by the app store owner, Google or otherwise.
In some ways, this is a really good idea, although instead of pushing an auditable qualification standard, pushing specific auditor firms and costs does not sit well with me.
It's always fun to bash Google, however business before pleasure and all that, I would rather see other stores take a similar stance, albeit with a more flexible regime depending on the data collected and the volatility of the use-cases. These proposed costs do seem rather excessive for the masses, and will probably end up inefficiently re-auditing a few advertising solutions hundreds of times as they are consumed in apps. Frankly Google, evil or otherwise, is scrutinised far more than random-app-developer.com's independent, unsupervised, data harvesting operation.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
