Apple Is Tracking You Even When Its Own Privacy Settings Say It's Not, New Research Says [View all]

https://gizmodo.com/apple-iphone-analytics-tracking-even-when-off-app-store-1849757558

An independent test suggests Apple collects data about you and your phone when its own settings promise “disable the sharing of Device Analytics altogether.”

For all of Apple’s talk about how private your iPhone is, the company vacuums up a lot of data about you. iPhones do have a privacy setting that is supposed to turn off that tracking. According to a new report by independent researchers, though, Apple collects extremely detailed information on you with its own apps even when you turn off tracking, an apparent direct contradiction of Apple’s own description of how the privacy protection works.

The iPhone Analytics setting makes an explicit promise. Turn it off, and Apple says that it will “disable the sharing of Device Analytics altogether.” However, Tommy Mysk and Talal Haj Bakry, two app developers and security researchers at the software company Mysk, took a look at the data collected by a number of Apple iPhone apps—the App Store, Apple Music, Apple TV, Books, and Stocks. They found the analytics control and other privacy settings had no obvious effect on Apple’s data collection—the tracking remained the same whether iPhone Analytics was switched on or off.

“The level of detail is shocking for a company like Apple,” Mysk told Gizmodo.