The operating system upgrade includes improvements like a Face ID that’s better attuned to face masks, as well as more convenient interoperability between Siri and various music apps. What’s generating the most discussion, though, is a tool called App Tracking Transparency, which allows users to prevent apps from sharing identifiable personal data with third parties. The tool, billed as a major step forward for user privacy, could roil the digital ads industry, whose major players often track users as they move between apps on their phones. The update should’ve shown up on your iPhone by now; if you weren’t prompted to download it, go to “Software Update” under your general settings. It’s a milestone for the consumer web and a possible blow to social media’s business model, which depends on selling highly personalized advertising. There’s one hitch: Even when you turn it on, you might not notice a single thing has changed.
It might seem like a fairly unremarkable feature, but App Tracking Transparency has the potential to reorient users’ relationships with their personal data, primarily by making the tracking opt-in. Prior to iOS 14.5, users did have the ability to limit the data that apps shared, but the default was to allow tracking, and you had to proactively check the settings to turn it off. Having the apps themselves ask this question upfront is an important aspect of the shift. “It’s not just giving users the choice,” said Gennie Gebhart, acting activism director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the internet-rights advocacy group. “It’s forcing these app developers to ask permission and possibly just stop tracking preemptively so they don’t have this scary permission associated with their app.” There’s a whole industry built around targeting ads using personal data, and if enough people start regularly opting out of tracking, Apple’s new tool could frustrate many of the businesses in this space. Facebook, in particular, is expecting the tool to have a small but noticeable effect on its revenue and has been taking out full-page ads characterizing Apple’s move as hurting small businesses. During the company’s quarterly earnings call in January, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg accused Apple of trying to “use their dominant platform position to interfere with how our apps and other apps work.”
However, if you turn tracking off for everything, will there be any actual differences in how you use your apps or what ads you see? According to Gebhart, it might not be so clear-cut. For instance, if you’re searching for grills on Chrome and then see ads for them on Facebook, that doesn’t necessarily mean that the tool isn’t doing its job. The ad-targeting ecosystem is so complex and multilayered that there are a number of ways that Facebook could determine that you want a grill just from your activity through first-party tracking on its own app. The platform could gather that you’re a middle-aged man who just bought a house in the suburbs at the beginning of the summer and determine that it’s likely that you’re in the market for a grill without ever looking at your Chrome browsing history. In other words, there probably won’t be any noticeable signs indicating that the tool is or isn’t working. You’ll know in theory that apps shouldn’t be swapping your data amongst themselves, but it likely won’t look all that different in practice.
This opacity is partly meant to make the user experience simpler. Being constantly exposed to the under-the-hood mechanics of the apps on your phone could be overwhelming. At the same time, though, keeping all this tracking hidden serves to obscure just how much of your personal info your apps are collecting and sharing. Apple’s new tool adds some more transparency—and thus friction—back into the equation, but there’s still a lot you won’t really be able to see. “There’s so much going on under the surface that advertisers and data brokers don’t want you to see, and all of the sudden Apple is forcing some of that above the surface, but it’s hard to say what to look for to know whether App Tracking Transparency is working,” Gebhart said, adding that users will continue to be at a disadvantage in trying to maintain their privacy online because of this dramatic information asymmetry. Still, one change that could result from Apple’s move is more chicanery from the data-hoovering business, which will need to find more creative ways to build profiles of internet users that can help advertisers target consumers. That’s why Gebhart says she’ll track which apps, if any, Apple decides to kick off its store for violating the tracking rules and any changes in strategy that companies in the digital ads industry are making.
With Apple acting as an unofficial regulator of user privacy, how will companies that want your data cope? It helps to understand how Apple’s update works.
by Aaron Mak, Slate | Read more:
Image: Loic Venance/AFP via Getty Images[ed. See also: Apple robbed the mob’s bank (Mobile Dev Memo).]
