Communications of the ACM
Your iOS App May Still Be Covertly Tracking You, Despite What Apple Says
The researchers said Apple is not required to follow its own App Tracking Transparency policy in many cases. They also noted that Apple exempts tracking for purposes of “obtaining information on a consumer’s creditworthiness for the specific p
Credit: Apple
Researchers at the U.K.’s University of Oxford found that iOS apps can still track users despite Apple's App Tracking Transparency (ATT) policy prohibiting app developers from tracking user activity across apps without explicit permission.
The researchers found nine iOS apps using server-side code to generate mutual user identifiers that can be used for cross-app tracking by a subsidiary of China's Alibaba.
They also compared 1,685 apps before and after the implementation of ATT, and found that the number of tracking libraries used by the apps held steady.
Although 25% of the apps said they collected no user data, 80% had at least one tracker library.
The researchers also found that over half of the apps using SKAdNetwork, Google Firebase Analytics, and Google Crashlytics, and 47% of those using Facebook SDK, did not disclose having access to user data.
From Ars Technica
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Abstracts Copyright © 2022 SmithBucklin, Washington, DC, USA
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