Facebook and Snapchat are still silently tracking iPhone users even when App Tracking Transparency is turned on

On iOS 14.5, Apple has added an extremely useful privacy protection feature for users called App Tracking Transparency. With this feature, iPhone users will have the power to decide whether to allow third-party apps to track them or not. According to the survey, after only a short time of release, many iPhone owners have activated App Tracking Transparency. Of which, only about 32% of users allow third-party applications to track them, while up to 68% of cases refuse to grant tracking permission.

Saying that to see App Tracking Transparency is a useful feature and trusted by many iOS users. However, a new report shows that some big apps like Snapchat and Facebook are still silently tracking iOS users even after they have enabled App Tracking Transparency to stop granting permission to third-party apps on iPhone. mine.

Specifically, a new report from the Financial Times shows that Facebook and Snapchat are still sharing "user-level data" from a series of iPhone devices around the world that have been discontinued via App Tracking Transparency. While in theory, the respective apps and services should not be allowed to track the personal information of the user's device. But in fact, this feature only helps users hide their specific identity from the eyes of Facebook and Snapchat only.

When activated, the App Tracking Transparency prompt will notify users that websites or apps are not currently collecting their data. However, this can be misinterpreted. Instead, it means that developers will not share the collected data with other companies. The Financial Times report argues that Facebook and Snapchat' have been allowed to continue sharing user-level signals from iPhones, as long as that data is anonymized and aggregated, rather than tied to specific user profiles' .

'The companies argued that Apple had made a convention with developers that they 'must not obtain data from a device for personally identifiable purposes'. This means that app developers can observe "data" from iPhones at a group level, allowing ads to still be tailored to match certain behaviors of a certain group of people, but not linked to a specific, personalized ID'.

So, logically, Snapchat and Facebook do not violate Apple's guidelines, which state that app developers cannot collect user data for "personally identifiable" purposes. It is understandable that they are still collecting user information, but not using it as individual-specific personal data, or specifically not associating this data with a unique ID number. Therefore, it is difficult to say that Snapchat and Facebook violate Apple's privacy policy. A clever form of 'circumvention'!

David Pac

Update 10 December 2021