Apple made privacy changes. Do they work?

Apple’s app tracking transparency settings don’t do enough to keep developers from collecting information about you, according to a report by Financial Times.

• The feature is meant to prevent app makers from tracking your every move and selling that information to advertisers.

Per The Verge, companies like Facebook didn’t like this new feature, saying it would hurt their ability to show personalized ads and hurt businesses that rely on these ads.

• According to the Financial Times, developers like Snap Inc., have continued collecting some data, even from those who asked the app not to track them, justifying it by saying that all the data is anonymized and grouped.
• Facebook has also been allowed to keep collecting data in order to stay engaged in a “multiyear effort” to rebuild ad infrastructure “using more aggregated or anonymized data,” per Financial Times.

Apple has told developers that it cannot gather data for the purpose of uniquely identifying it.

• Ads can be trailed to “cohorts” that showcase a certain behavior instead of being associated with unique IDs. And this type of tracking is becoming more popular, per the report.

According to The Verge, some developers also try to make predictions about users and their habits based on the information they have received in the past.

• Personalized data like IP address, location and screen size are still available to developers to help the ads fit properly on screen and appear in the right language, according to Financial Times.

While Apple wants customers to think that when they choose Apple, they choose privacy, that isn’t the case.