Apple's 'App Tracking Transparency' doesn't stop developers from collecting information on you

Apple’s 'App Tracking Transparency' is a handy feature, but it is not a setting that can help protect your privacy. A recent report serves as a reminder of this while pointing out what the App Tracking Transparency settings cover and don't cover to protect the users' privacy.

The report reminds users that while the settings do stop apps from collecting and selling data that's tied to a user's personal advertising identity, it "does not keep developers from collecting information about you".

Apple introduced App Tracking Transparency with iOS 14.5 and the feature was aimed at stopping app makers from tracking what users do and selling that information to advertisers. One of the companies that had a huge issue with this feature was Meta (Facebook). The social media platform had said that the feature would affect its ability to show personalised and targeted ads to its users and thus hurt the business of all those advertisers who "relied on those ads".

A report by Financial Times suggests that developers have taken Apple’s app tracking rules to mean that they are not allowed to "target ads at cohorts, or groups that people are put into without needing to have unique IDs assigned". However, reportedly, developers like Snap continue "collecting some data, including from those who have asked them not to track them". The justification furnished here is that "anything that could be tied to an individual user would be anonymised and grouped".

This conceptually brings Apple’s App Tracking Transparency closer to Google’s FLoC. Google’s FLoC, or Federated Learing of Cohorts, is its plan for a "post-third-party cookie internet", where users are essentially assigned labels that describe what products they might be interested in instead of being tracked individually. Under FLoC, users can still be shown targeted ads but without advertisers having to track each user individually.

As The Verge points out, some developers have admitted that they try to make predictions about "what users to (do?) after seeing ads based on info they receive from ad companies”. The Financial Times says that some personalised data like the IP address, location, screen size, etc "still makes its way to advertisers". This data helps advertisers ensure ads fit properly and show up in the right language.

According to reports, Facebook and some other companies are planning on "selling ads using aggregated or anonymised data" which targets a group and not an individual. Facebook "partially blamed" Apple’s app tracking policies for missing its earnings goals in the last quarter and said that its ads were affected by the rules. However, the company said that the affected ads made up only 5 per cent of its annual ad revenue. So, Apple’s new rules aren’t and weren't going to destroy Facebook’s ad business, after all.

An older investigation conducted by Financial Times found that Snap, Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube lost about $10 billion combined after Apple rolled out the new ad tracking rules. It went on to say that there is a market for ads driven by personalised data but it’s not the entirety of it. The latest report is just a reminder that Apple might want to stand up for its users, but it cannot quite stop companies from collecting user data with a single toggle.

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