According to an independent study by Mysk, Apple collects extremely detailed information about users through the company’s apps even when the tracking setting is turned off. This clearly contradicts Apple’s own description of privacy protection.
Detailed real-time user data collection
Setting up iPhone Analytics makes an explicit promise. Turning it off “completely terminates the transfer of Device Analytics data.” Tommy Mysk and Talal Hai Bakri, app developers and security researchers, studied data collected by a range of iPhone apps: App Store, Apple Music, Apple TV, Books, and Stocks. They found that analytics controls and other privacy settings had no discernible impact on Apple’s data collection process—tracking remained the same whether iPhone Analytics was enabled or not.
“The level of detail [of the transmitted data] is shocking for a company like Apple,” Mysk said. “I expected a company that considers privacy a basic human right to collect more general analytics.”
It turned out that the App Store collects information about all user actions in real time. This includes any taps, app search results, list of ads viewed, time spent in the app, and how the user found the app. The programs also sent information about the device and its owner, including identification numbers, phone model, screen resolution, keyboard languages, how you connected to the Internet, such as information about the device’s digital fingerprint.
“Enabling or disabling personalization options did not reduce the amount of analytics sent by the app,” Mysk said. “I have disabled all possible options, namely personalized advertising, personalized recommendations, and sharing of usage data and analytics.”
In particular, the Health and Wallet apps didn’t send any analytics data at all, regardless of whether iPhone Analytics was turned on or off, while Apple Music, Apple TV, Books, iTunes Store, and Stocks sent data also regardless. from her. The researchers found that most of the apps sent data with the same identification numbers, which allowed Apple to track the user’s activity in their services.
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Investigated regular and jailbroken iPhone – to find out what data is being sent
The researchers tested their work on two different devices. They used a jailbroken iPhone running iOS 14.6, which allowed them to decrypt the traffic and see exactly what data was being sent. Apple introduced App Tracking Transparency in iOS 14.5, prompting users to decide whether to share their data with specific apps.
A regular iPhone running iOS 16, the latest operating system, was also studied, confirming the findings. According to the researchers, there is no reason to believe that a jailbroken smartphone sends any other data than a non-jailbroken one – the applications sent the same data packets to the same Apple addresses.
The data was transferred at the same time under the same circumstances, and turning the available privacy settings on and off didn’t change anything either. The researchers were unable to determine exactly what data was sent in the second case because the phone’s encryption was left intact, but the similarity of the packets suggests this may be standard iPhone behavior.
Apple position
This is not a situation where you can say “all applications are spying, so what did you want?”. According to Mysk, the results of the study are not in line with standard industry practice. In the past, he and his partner have done similar tests with Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge analytics. Both of these apps were not sending data when analytics collection settings were disabled.
Apple does not respond to multiple requests for clarification. It’s impossible to know what a company is doing with the data without its own explanation – Apple has so far remained silent on such matters. It is possible that the company does not use the information when you turn off the corresponding setting – but this does not correspond to how the company explains how the settings work in their privacy policy.
Privacy is one of the main issues that Apple uses to emphasize the competitive advantage of its devices. The company places a simple and unambiguous slogan “Privacy. It’s an iPhone.”
Apple also says that device users shouldn’t think of what it’s doing as tracking. The company’s website says:
“Apple’s ad platform doesn’t track you, which means it doesn’t link user or device data collected from our apps with user or device data collected from third parties for ad targeting, and doesn’t share user or device data with brokers data”.
In other words, “our tracking is not tracking unless the data collected by the services of different companies is linked together.” If only one company — Apple — is collecting data, then by Apple’s definition, it’s not tracking. Of course, this is different from the definition of tracking that people use by default.
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Source: Gizmodo
