Yet Another Study Shows Apple’s Hyped Privacy Standards Are Often Empty Theater

Privacy

from the hollow-bravado dept

For the last few years Apple has worked overtime trying to market itself as a more privacy-focused company. 40-foot billboards of the iPhone with the slogan “Privacy. That’s iPhone” have been a key part of company marketing for years. The only problem: researchers keep highlighting how a lot of Apple’s well-hyped privacy changes are performative in nature.

The company’s “do not track” button, first included in iOS 14.5, has received the lion’s share of this attention, and has been frequently heralded as such an incredible revolution in consumer privacy it wound up making Mark Zuckerberg very, very sad.

But while Apple may be better on privacy than some companies (which isn’t hard), studies keep showing that numerous app makers have been able to simply tap dancing around Apple’s heavily hyped do not track restrictions for some time, often without any penalty by Apple months after being contacted by reporters. In short, “do not track” doesn’t deliver on its promise.

Similarly, the iPhone Analytics setting makes an explicit promise to users that if they flip a button, they’ll be able to “disable the sharing of Device Analytics altogether.” But researchers have now shown that’s really not true either:

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.

Researchers found that even when they flipped off every privacy button on the iPhone, the app store still tracked every behavior in real time, including what apps a user searched for, what ads were seen, and how long ads were looked at. The App store app also tracked user ID numbers, phone model, screen resolution, keyboard languages, and details on your internet connection.

Apple, as it often does, responded to this and previous allegations on its privacy being a bit hollow by simply… not commenting.

Again, that’s not to say that Apple isn’t better on privacy than many of its competitors, but in the free for all privacy landscape across telecom, adtech, apps and hardware, that just doesn’t mean much. We’re a country that, for thirty years, prioritized making money over consumer privacy, and we’re too collectively corrupt to pass even a baseline federal privacy law for the internet era.

What we get instead is theater. Buttons that do little. Promises and policies that mean less. Lots of empty lip service paid toward consumer choice. And when we do get privacy legislation it’s often either terribly crafted, left unenforced, or so filled with loopholes as to largely be just a performance validating bad behaviors companies already engage in. And there’s very little indication any of this will change soon.

Filed Under: advertising, consumer rights, data privacy, ios, iphone, privacy, snooping, surveillance, tracking
Companies: apple