Despite positioning itself as a pro-privacy tech company, Apple has been accused by iOS developers of behavior that “should raise many privacy concerns.” It all relates to Apple’s own apps, including the App Store, and the way usage data is allegedly shared with Apple even when the user has turned off analytics sharing and personalized recommendations.
The Twitter account Mysk, which is run by a pair of devs in Canada and Germany, posted a thread last week warning that, if you’re using the App Store app in iOS 14.6, “every tap you make” is recorded and sent to Apple. According to the developers, this is regardless of user preferences and settings. Apple has several toggles designed to reduce tracking, but the developers say that “opting-out or switching the personalization options off did not reduce the amount of detailed analytics that the app was sending.”
Follow-up by GizmodoThe developers discovered that many other apps, such as Music, TV and Books, the iTunes Store and Stocks, sent data to Apple, despite their privacy toggles. (The Health and Wallet apps, however, didn’t transmit any analytics data at all.) Researchers found that the majority of apps that sent analytics data shared common ID numbers. This allowed Apple to track your activity across services.
Apple was quickly A California class-action lawsuit brought against youAfter the findings were made publicly. After the findings were made public, The suit alleges that Apple “violates state law in connection with its illegal recording of consumers’ confidential activity on its consumer mobile applications,” and charges that Apple is violating trust with “its pervasive and unlawful data tracking and collection business.” Apple has not yet responded to the suit, which seeks “compensatory, statutory, and punitive damages in amounts to be determined by the Court and/or jury.”
The thread further points out that Apple’s alleged tracking seems ironic, given that iOS 14.5 saw the introduction of Strenuous measuresThird-party developers cannot track users without user consent. It’s worth noting that the iOS 14.6 operating system is more than a year old now, but the authors said they saw the same apps sending similar packets of data when running iOS 16.
It seems that this was more about intent than technology. This is because the tracking occurred during the implementation of pro-privacy measures. It’s hard to see why Apple would still have been harvesting usage data under iOS 14.6 and then backtracked in a later update without any obvious motivation.
Apple’s business model has changed in the exact opposite direction from the days of App Tracking Transparency, which was touted as the future for user privacy. The rising prevalence of Ads on the App Shop–despite the store already being a phenomenal revenue driver for Apple–hints at a strategy focused on wringing out every drop of available income rather than prioritizing the user experience. Ads, by and large, work better when they’re optimized with user information.
