In September 2021, The Washington Post featured a study by Lockdown Privacy that showed how apps may circumvent Apple’s tracking rules by creating “fingerprints” of a device using specific data related to your phone, similar to how the technique works on desktop browsers. And trying to understand a company’s privacy policy is unlikely to be more helpful.Įven after taking all of the above precautions, you may still see surprisingly personalized ads. But these reports are likely indecipherable to anyone who isn’t trained in ad tech and who doesn’t know the differences between companies such as Crashlytics, DoubleClick, and Firebase. If you want to root out what your apps are doing, you can do so as long as you’re running at least iOS 15.2, in which Apple introduced the App Privacy Report.
Android owners can get a similar feature in DuckDuckGo’s App Tracking Protection.
Both apps’ free versions can do the trick in this regard, but they also push you to subscribe to their expensive paid plans, which we don’t think most people need to do.
Using an app that acts as a firewall, like Lockdown Privacy or Disconnect’s Privacy Pro, can block apps’ access to most other trackers but can occasionally break websites and make them unreadable (if this happens, you can temporarily disable the app and reload a broken page).
If you don’t want companies to track you or you’re just sick of seeing the prompts every time you install a new app, you should disable tracking entirely by heading to Settings > Privacy > Tracking and disabling Allow Apps to Request to Track. A stat from Flurry Analytics suggests that only around 4% of people have preemptively disabled the tracking opt-in feature on the operating-system level. Instead of rejecting tracking on an app-by-app basis, you can reject all tracking in advance. In contrast, if you don’t opt in to giving an app your IDFA number, the app cannot personalize ads based on that number. Or it can potentially tell a business if you saw an ad and eventually purchased a product, which lets the business know that a particular campaign was successful.
That information all gets packaged together and sold to advertisers, which then display ads in the app based on all of your behavior. Here’s how it works: If you allow an app to track you, the app then gets access to your device’s IDFA number (think of it as being like a Social Security number attached to your phone), and it can track the other apps you download, the ads you might see, or the shopping you do. Instead of rejecting tracking on an app-by-app basis, you can reject all tracking in advance.Īpple’s definition of tracking is narrow, referring only to data about you that is shared among multiple companies for advertising purposes. This was a big shift, as most similar types of tracking are always opt-out, so they’re enabled by default and you have to go in and manually turn the tracking off. Starting with iOS 14.5, Apple made tracking the IDFA opt-in, which means you have to purposefully enable it-each app must ask you to allow tracking when you first use it. Some Apple devices, including iPhones and iPads, use something called an identifier for advertisers, or IDFA, which allows app makers to track your activity across apps for advertising purposes.