While Apple has positioned itself as a privacy-conscious company, a new study shows that Apple's proprietary apps collect detailed information about users even when the tracking feature is turned off.
Apple Privacy
Branded apps track data
The iPhone Analytics setting, which promises to "completely disable shared access to Device Analytics," does nothing for Apple apps, the study finds. App developers and security researchers Tommy Mysk and Talal Hai Bakri examined data collected by several iPhone apps, including the App Store, Apple Music, Apple TV, Books and Stocks. They found that all of these apps ignored iPhone Analytics and other privacy settings. Regardless of whether users turned these settings on or off, these iPhone apps will send the same amount of data to Apple.
For example, the App Store seems to collect data on just about everything users do. This includes the apps they open, search queries, ads they view, and more. The App Store also sent data about the devices users had, including ID numbers, screen resolutions, keyboard languages and more.
Other apps shared data about what users were doing in those apps, such as what promotions they were viewing in the Stocks app. Notably, the Health and Wallet apps did not share any analytics data regardless of the settings.
Testing hacked iPhones
Mysk and Bakri tested two iPhones: a hacked iPhone running iOS 14.6 and a regular iPhone running iOS 16. With the hacked iPhone, the developers were able to decrypt the traffic sent from the phones. They chose iOS 14.6 in part because Apple introduced an app-tracking transparency feature in iOS 14.5 that included a prompt asking users if they wanted to allow the app to track them.
iPhone privacy
According to the researchers, there's no reason to believe that the jailbroken smartphone was sending any different data than the unhacked one - the apps were sending similar data packets to the same Apple web addresses. What's more, the data was sent at the same time and under the same circumstances, and setting different privacy settings didn't matter.
Perhaps Apple doesn't use the information it receives if privacy settings are enabled, but then why collect it at all? What's more, the developers point out that the iPhone Analytics setup doesn't work properly anyway. What's more, Mysk and Bakri said that the third-party apps they tested don't send data when the analytics settings are turned off.
What makes Apple's data collection particularly egregious is that the company has long noted that privacy is a competitive advantage of their devices. So in Toronto, Apple put up huge billboards noting that "Privacy. It's the iPhone."
Apple's position
In its defense, Apple states that its "advertising platform does not track you" because it does not link user or device data collected from its apps to user or device data obtained from third parties for the purpose of targeted advertising, and it does not share user or device data with data brokers. In other words, Apple's tracking is not tracking because only Apple collects this data, which seems like a very convenient approach to tracking for the company.
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