According to a new report from independent researchers, although Apple has been talking about how private your iPhone is the company still collects a lot of your data. For a company like Apple, the level of detail it knows about you is astounding, said researcher Maisk.
According to reports, the iPhone does have a privacy setting that turns off this tracking. However, Apple collects extremely detailed information about you through its own apps even when you turn off tracking, which apparently contradicts Apple's own description of how privacy protection works.
The iPhone Analytics settings make a clear promise, and if you turn it off, Apple says it will "completely disable the sharing of device analytics. However, Tommy Minsk and Talal Haji Buckley, two app developers and security researchers at Minsk Software studied the data collected by Apple's iPhone apps - App Store, Apple Music, Apple TV, Books, and Stocks.
They found that analytics controls and other privacy settings had no discernible effect on Apple's data collection tracking the same whether iPhone analytics is on or off. Health and Wallet apps, for example, don't transmit any analytics data whether iPhone analytics is turned on or off, while Apple Music, Apple TV, Books, iTunes Store, and Stocks all do, the researchers said. The researchers found that most apps that send analytics data share a consistent ID number, which would allow Apple to track your activity through its services.
For example, the Stocks app sends Apple a list of stocks you follow, the names of stocks you browse or search for, the point in time of your search, and a record of any news articles you see in the app. This information is sent to a URL called analytics. This transfer is separate from the iCloud communication required to sync data across devices. Unlike other apps, however, Stocks sends a different ID number and device information is far less detailed.
Maisk said, it's not a situation where all the apps are tracking me. He and his research partners have conducted similar tests in the past on Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge analytics. In both apps, the data isn't sent when the analytics settings are turned off.
Apple doing this by keeping tabs on its users will piss some people off, regardless of the importance of the concerns. For example, in the App Store, when you browse apps related to mental health, addiction, or sexual orientation, you may find some content that you don't want to be sent to the company's servers. It's no surprise that Apple collects analytics information, it's spelled out in its privacy policy, and nearly every app and device you use may use your data for analytics.
But Maisk said he was struck by the level of detail. I wish a company like Apple that believes privacy is a fundamental human right will collect more general analytics data.
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