What if you just turn location sharing off for the FaceBook app (or all apps). Are they still harvesting your location data?
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Apple Hit With $2.7 Billion Lawsuit Over App Tracking Rules
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What if you just turn location sharing off for the FaceBook app (or all apps). Are they still harvesting your location data?
Multiple governments are being directed to make it so that App Store users can be tracked via third parties without notifying customers of that fact. When a company’s main business is “tracking people across the internet then selling their data to others”, it’s no surprise that they want to ensure that remains possible.
Go ahead and turn off location for Facebook. Just remember that you probably have it turned on for OpenTable, Lyft, Uber, Waze, and Yelp and don't normally think about it because location awareness is what makes those apps most useful. Check and make sure location is turned off on your loyalty-program shopping apps (e.g., Walmart, Safeway, Smiths, Target, etc.) too. Just check location sharing on all your apps. You might be shocked at how many want it, but don't need it, including games.
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That would be blocking customers from their service/data entitlements. Which I guess could be fun!
“I signed into my Netflix account and it says I can’t watch any videos.”
“That’s correct, now that we follow more stricter anti-tracking, that includes not tracking your location. So, without being able to tell what country you’re in, we can’t ensure we’re delivering you the appropriate content for your region.”
“I’m trying to get access to my bank account.”
“Ah, I can see why you’d want to do that. However, we no longer track users via this app so there’s no way for us to know who you are.”
“But I logged in!”
“Yes, but that information just gives you access to see the app’s interface. To access your funds, you’d need to come to a branch.”
🙂
China has a healthy tech economy of which Apple is only a small slice of. A thing that you may have noticed is NOT true of these other regions. 🙂
I don’t know why those companies feel that we don’t want to simply sign into them as a first party and remove all this silly third party business. 🙂 Sure, it would make signing in to apps take a weee bit longer, but for users that want to be tracked, they’d relish the opportunity!
Ya what I am wondering about is if you say turn location sharing off for the Facebook app, gmail app, etc. but leave it on for Lyft, can Facebook and Google still get it from Lyft? Presumably Lyft Google and Facebook all have the same identifiers for your phone - so if Lyft sells your location data can Facebook and Google essentially get it by matching up identifiers? Then Facebook and Google can sell your profile with location data to even more people?
I don’t actually use any of these apps - I was just curious if turning location data off for an app is even a useful measure for being tracked by these app embedded advertising trackers.
Some people believe everything they read...
Some people believe the privacy myth...
Some believe their favorite company...
It’s rather fascinating.
Some people believe the privacy myth...
Some believe their favorite company...
It’s rather fascinating.
surferfb
macrumors 68030
If Apple actually was selling our data to data brokers it would be comically simple to identify and security researchers definitely would have flagged it by now.
Is Apple perfect? Of course not. But they’re definitely way, way, way better than anyone else. And absolutely better than data brokers suing because they think it’s not fair Apple makes their job harder.
Graphate
macrumors 6502
I’m not sure how fascinating it is, but my interpretation of people who praise Apple for their privacy isn’t so much a statement about how great Apple is, so much as it is a statement about how much you give up at other companies with similar products and services.
I think that’s probably true, it would be a pretty big story, and an Apple lawyer would have turned evidence over in one of the related cases, or leaked by a disgruntled employee.
And agreed, not perfect, but if the choice is an amalgamation of off grid with some Linux devices or Apple, the trade off is pretty easy to make for now.
Graphate
macrumors 6502
I think both yes, but also that they probably don’t need to. Companies like Google, Meta, even Lyft have enough of their own data that they can match you up to a pretty hyper specific profile with a few clicks and predict your needs from there. The objective is to sell you something or on an idea, or both.
How much money they were making off that sale of data would also appear on their books AND on the books of the data brokers as both Apple and the largest data brokers are publicly traded. Apple would be required to divulge those profits as a part of their portfolio to investors and shareholders as it would probably be a significant additional revenue stream if they did.
This is what third-party tracking is all about. If third-party tracking is enabled, one doesn’t have to be logged into Meta for Meta to have a user’s location if Meta has a tracker in an ad that an app developer is displaying in their app. If someone chooses to “Ask App Not to Track”, that tells the third-party (ad networks in most cases) that the user prefers if they did NOT do the sneaky data collection required to infer who they are across apps and websites.
Coupled with the strong consumer protections in some regions, an ad company that tracks a user against their will and is discovered (which, it would be trivially easy to do so) might face enormous fines in those regions. That’s why those regions with stronger consumer protections don’t want users to have the ability to clearly state that they don’t want to be tracked by third-parties.