According to an article from the Financial Times, the Apple Transparency App Transparency would not prevent Facebook and Snapchat from recovering data from iOS 15 users.Explanation.

Apple advertising poster in Las Vegas during CES 2019 // Source: Chris Velazco / Engadget

Announced with great fanfare in May 2021, the Apple Transparency App Transparency, which consists in obliging the apps to ask you for your authorization before tracking you on iPhone was supposed to constitute the new Apple cornerstone to differentiate itself from Android.

According to a recent publication of the Financial Times, the rules of privacy issued by Apple, and applied in iOS 15, would not be as strict as its communication suggests.Indeed, the British daily has obtained several evidence that shows that Facebook and Snapchat, can today continue to share data for advertising purposes from iPhone users, "provided that this data is anonymous and aggregated and not linkedto specific user profiles, ”writes the Financial Times.

Examples of Snapchat and Facebook

The economy newspaper cites the two examples of Snapchat and Facebook, which would have worked internally in this sense.

Snapchat would have told his investors that he planned to share the data of his 306 million users, including those who do not wish to be followed.Sheryl Sandberg, the head of operations at Facebook would have said that the social network was engaged in an effort to "rebuild the advertising infrastructure" using "aggregated or anonymized data".

For its part, Apple would have simply indicated to the developers that they were able to observe "signals" of an iPhone at the level of a group to adapt their campaign to "cohorts", without associating a single identifier.

Why is it problematic

In short, Apple would have given users the possibility of saying no to the monitoring of the apps, communicated heavily on this, before finally giving authorization to third-party applications to follow you anyway.Let's not be afraid of words: if that were to be verified, Apple's position would be minimum hypocrite.

Here is the kind of message that can be received on iOS 15 when you launch an application for the first time.Reassuring, but possibly misleading ...

Especially since at first glance, Apple has no interest in making this choice.Indeed, the Apple brand has always defended itself to sell data to advertisers or to third parties.The Cupertino firm even built all its economic model around this promise.Apple himself collects data by anonymizing it, but does not sell it, there is the nuance.

It is therefore difficult to enter why Apple would let Facebook and Snapchat collect data on its users, without any financial consideration a priori.Is it a technical error?

Cory Munchbach, Director of the exploitation of the BlueConic Customer Data Platform offers a track in the Financial Times article: “Apple cannot put herself in a situation where it essentially evisits its most efficient applications from the point of viewuser consumption, ”she said."It would finally harm iOS".In other words, it is better to be an effective platform with a few compromises than zero compromises and a platform that loses in dynamics.

In addition, the fact that the data collected is anonymized does not change anything, because it is already the case everywhere else.The specialists in the avoidance of tracking large tech companies know this well: no social network or no app has a file to your name somewhere in its office.You are necessarily part of a group, a cohort of individuals who have been judged to have in common with you allowing you to target yourself in a marketing campaign.

This solution would have become the standard."Aggregated solutions constitute the default for 95 %" of Oren Kaniel customers, Managing Director of Apps Flyer, a platform that works with application developers, quoted by the Financial Times.

What information is leaking?

Lockdown Privacy, an application that blocks the trackers cited by the Financial Times has repeatedly tested certain applications on iOS and has noted that "the information on the devices is sent to the trackers in almost all cases".

The information sent would go from the IP address to the location of the user, including the language of the user or the size of the screen.Some of this information is necessary for the proper functioning of the application it is true.

In any case, these revelations throw a veil of doubt on the iOS tracking options.

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