Apple Allegedly Tracks Users Even With Privacy Enabled, New Findings Suggest
Apple has always maintained an image of privacy that ensures users’ data is not tracked—it even launched an ad campaign to boast about it. However, two analysts have just examined said privacy policy and found that that might not be the case.
A software company named Mysk looked under the hood of Apple’s tracking habits and found that every user’s move was being recorded and sent back to headquarters. Of course, this is true only for its in-house apps, such as the App Store, Apple Music, Apple TV, Stocks, and Books.
To experiment, two different types of phones were used. One was a jailbroken iPhone on iOS 14.6 that allowed the team to decrypt and examine precisely what was being sent. At the same time, the second was a regular iPhone using iOS16.
The findings were compiled into a video and series of Tweets that laid out exactly how Apple tracks its customers. For example, Mysk found that it could gather information on everything you tapped on, apps you searched for, advertisements you were given, and how long you interacted with an app.
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— Mysk 🇨🇦🇩🇪 (@mysk_co) November 3, 2022
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The recent changes that Apple has made to App Store ads should raise many #privacy concerns. It seems that the #AppStore app on iOS 14.6 sends every tap you make in the app to Apple.👇This data is sent in one request: (data usage & personalized ads are off)#CyberSecurity pic.twitter.com/1pYqdagi4e
Moreover, it sent out details including ID numbers, your phone model, keyboard languages, how you connected to the internet, and even your screen resolution.
The only ones that didn’t collect information were the Health and Wallet apps, which remained faithful to the notion of privacy.
Interestingly, all the data was collected regardless of whether a user had the Analytics setting turned on or off.
Gizmodo had reached out to Mysk for a more detailed explanation of the types of information being shared, and it responded with an example of the Stocks.
From there, Apple could watch the stocks people were interested in, the names and times of the stocks viewed or searched, and a record of news articles viewed within the app. This was then sent to a website called https://stocks-analytics-events.apple.com/analyticseventsv2/async.
Apple has always touted privacy to its users, ensuring that no data will ever be shared. However, the finding has demonstrated that Apple defines tracking differently from what the public perceives.
As long as it’s not giving information to third parties—which it is not—it’s not considered monitoring per se. Instead, it considers this just analytics. But what’s striking is that even if you choose not to share details when setting up your phone, it still does so anyway.
In a statement from Mysk to Gizmodo, the analysts noted that taking data such as this to study is not alarming. What is concerning is the level of detail that Apple exerts on its customers. With more advertisements on the way to the App Store, it’s unclear if this information will play a part in that.
[via Gizmodo and 9to5Mac, Photo 190135551 © Rafael Henrique | Dreamstime.com]
