If you tap Ask App Not to Track, your IDFA is withheld. Starting with iOS 14.5, apps must send you a notification and receive your permission before they can track and share your activity. As Pete Snyder, senior privacy researcher and director of privacy at Brave, a browser and software company that emphasizes its privacy-protection features, explains: “So even if an app isn’t ‘monetizing’ by showing you ads, apps will collect everything they can, on the vague chance that with enough machine learning and combining with other data sets, they’ll find some unique data point about you that someone in the surveillance economy will pay them for.” Not all apps that declare their data gathering in the Data Used to Track You portion have ads, but they may sell or share data. This data tracking across apps explains how you can search for, say, a pair of running shoes in one app, and then ads for running shoes start showing up in other apps like Instagram. Or for a more detailed look at how ridiculously complicated this can get, check out this chart. The Wall Street Journal has a useful graphic (subscription required) that explains how these ads tend to work. Of the 20 weather apps we looked at, 17 of them indicated on their label that they gathered data to track devices for the purpose of advertising, and 14 of those used location information to track devices.Įven without your contact info, the data your app activity generates is tracked by a device ID, a unique identifier (that is, an “identifier for advertisers,” or IDFA for short) that makes it easy for third parties to track you through other apps, services, and websites. And if you see “Contact Info” listed as data an app can collect, that can include your name, address, phone number, email address, and “Any other information that can be used to contact the user outside the app.” Advertising companies often defend the practice by noting that the information collected is typically tied to a unique number, not a person, but it’s often trivial to link a device to a person. Apple’s definition of tracking refers to any data collected in an app about a person or a device (your iPhone or iPad) that is linked to data collected by another party, such as a data broker or advertising network. Nearly two-thirds of the apps we looked at indicated the collection of some types of data under Data Used to Track You. (Though if you’d prefer to skip straight to the how-to portion for disabling all of these prompts, see our instructions.) Data Used to Track You To really understand how your privacy is affected by these new tracking-request pop-ups and how to deal with each one thoughtfully, you’ll need to understand the labels. This labeling gets complicated quickly, and the same type of data can appear in multiple categories. Data Not Linked to You that the company generally aggregates into larger statisticsĮach category lists any of the 14 different types of data that the app collects and uses, as self-reported by the app’s developer.Data Linked to You (and your real identity) that is collected by the app and company but not shared.Data Used to Track You (or your device) and shared across different apps, ad networks, and companies.Head into the Apple App Store, and below the reviews you’ll find an App Privacy section consisting of three categories: Understanding Apple’s three privacy categoriesĪpple divides its privacy labels into three categories, with the goal of helping you understand what data an app collects and how that data is used. 1 We found that most of them do indeed collect and share a lot about you, and that some of the longtime worst offenders haven’t changed their behavior just because there’s a system pop-up or store label these days. We decided to see what we could learn about data tracking on iPhones and iPads by reading 250 App Store labels, including those for some of the most popular apps. On the App Store, Apple’s recently introduced “privacy nutrition label” helps detail what information each app seeks to collect, store, and share, but the implications aren’t always clear. When you open apps for the first time after Apple’s latest system update, you’ll get a pop-up asking to “track your activity,” and your approval will give permission for developers to link information about you to an advertising profile that can track you across apps (and across the web). When millions of iPhones update to iOS 14.5 in the coming weeks, it will become much more obvious that many of the most common apps-including weather trackers, dating apps, and games-are advertising-data tools as much as they are anything else.
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