After many disagreements with platforms like Facebook, Apple has now reached a truce in their app tracking policy, now allowing apps to receive “user-level” personal data.
Earlier this year, Apple launched ‘App Tracking Transparency‘ which allowed users to opt-in or out of apps gathering information about you for advertisers. Of course, this meant that fewer people were being tracked, which was not very good for the advertisers.
Due to this drop in tracking, many tech platforms lost their ad revenue. Snap, the company behind Snapchat, had its shares plummet 25% after revealing that Apple’s policy affected its advertising business. Facebook was vehemently against App Tracking Transparency and even printed a full-page ad in newspapers protesting against it. Their argument was that it affected small businesses and cut over 60% in sales for every dollar they spend.
What can apps track now?
In Apple’s user privacy documentation, it’s stated that developers “may not derive data from a device for the purpose of uniquely identifying it.” This means that instead of “fingerprinting” your device and identifying specific users, developers can simply track users by lumping them together by behaviours.
If developers want to collect personal data, they must first remove any identifiers “such as user ID or name”, so data is aggregated instead of personalised. Nowadays, aggregated tracking is the norm and Apple is allowing developers to continue doing so. Apple was quite strict with their privacy rules and even defended it when Facebook protested, but they’re now loosening up because being too strict would disrupt the mobile ad ecosystem.
Even though the tracked data is anonymised, we can never be sure that our data is protected. Cory Munchbach, chief operating officer at customer data platform BlueConic, said “If historical precedent in adtech holds, those black boxes hide a lot of sins. It’s not unreasonable to assume it leaves a lot to be desired.”
Lockdown Privacy, a tracking-blocking service, criticised Apple’s policy by calling it “functionally useless in stopping third-party tracking” and saying that your personal data is “being sent to trackers in almost all cases.”
So the next time you tap ‘Ask App Not To Track’, just know it doesn’t stop the app from collecting your data.
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