Privacy is Not Optional: How OWASP MASVS-P will Help Your Mobile App Stay Compliant

Understanding the New Privacy Category in OWASP MASVS and Why It Matters for GDPR and Your Business.

✨ Introduction: Why Privacy Is No Longer Optional

In today’s digital world, privacy is no longer a nice-to-have feature: it’s a legal requirement and a customer expectation. As engineering teams, we’ve long focused on security: protecting data from unauthorized access and ensuring the integrity of our systems. But privacy goes beyond that. It's about how personal data is collected, used, shared, and controlled, and more importantly, whether users are aware of it.

The OWASP Mobile Application Security Verification Standard (MASVS) is introducing a new category, MASVS-P for Privacy, which brings structure to privacy-centric mobile app testing. While still under development, it highlights key practices aligned with legal regulations like the GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation).

In many projects, privacy is misunderstood or underestimated. It's often seen as a blocker to product delivery or mistakenly treated as a "checkbox" for legal teams to handle. But in reality, privacy by design is a shared responsibility, and one that impacts your brand trust, legal exposure, and long-term success.

Privacy isn’t just best practice, it’s law. Non-compliance with GDPR can lead to fines, reputational damage, or even app store removal.

What is MASVS-P and Why Should You Care?

The new MASVS-PRIVACY category focuses on privacy controls within the mobile app itself, what can be analyzed and verified through static or dynamic analysis. It's not meant to replace full legal reviews or DPIAs (Data Protection Impact Assessments) but offers a baseline for ensuring that your app respects user data at a technical level.

MASVS-P is built on four key principles:

🧠 TL;DR

• Only collect what you need, and nothing more.

• Don’t track users unless you really need to, and when you do, isolate that data.

• Tell users what you’re doing with their data, clearly and honestly.

• Give users real choices and respect them.

1. Data Minimization (MASVS-PRIVACY-1)

Apps should request the minimum amount of data necessary for functionality, with informed user consent. This includes managing what third-party SDKs are doing under the hood and ensuring they don’t collect or share data before consent is given. This also connects with growing interest in SBOMs (Software Bill of Materials) to manage data risks across supply chains.

2. Avoiding User Identification (MASVS-PRIVACY-2)

Even indirect identifiers like device fingerprints, IP addresses, or behavioral patterns can be used to track users. MASVS-P encourages using anonymization, pseudonymization, and unlinkability techniques, especially when combining data streams from different parts of your app or third-party services.

3. Transparency (MASVS-PRIVACY-3)

Privacy isn’t just about compliance, it’s about trust. MASVS-P requires that apps clearly inform users about data collection and usage, including behaviors they wouldn't expect (like background data collection or silent syncing). This includes ensuring that privacy policies, app store declarations, and in-app explanations are consistent.

4. User Control (MASVS-PRIVACY-4)

Users must be able to manage, delete, and modify their data, and revoke previously given consent. MASVS-P also emphasizes that additional consent should be requested if the app’s data use changes.

How We Help You Build Privacy-First Apps ?

At Neopixl, we can integrate privacy principles from day one:

• We design and test apps with MASVS L1, L2, R, and now P controls in mind.

• We audit third-party SDKs to ensure consent is respected and data collection is minimized.

• We can help document your data flows, making DPIA preparation easier for your legal teams.

We educate our teams on how privacy affects UX, analytics, and mobile and backend architectures.