Apple Sued for Tracking Users’ Activity Even When Settings were off

(CTN News) – Apple has concentrated on consumer privacy over the last several years. The iPhone manufacturer has argued with other Big Tech firms, most notably Meta, which owns Facebook.

Platforms like Facebook have lost billions of dollars in revenue due to Apple’s attempts to preserve customer data.

However, it now seems that Apple has been gathering user data independently, even if users had specifically adjusted their settings to prevent the corporation from doing so. Apple is now being sued.

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The recent changes that Apple has made to App Store ads should raise many #privacy concerns. It seems that the #AppStore app on iOS 14.6 sends every tap you make in the app to Apple.👇This data is sent in one request: (data usage & personalized ads are off)#CyberSecurity pic.twitter.com/1pYqdagi4e

— Mysk 🇨🇦🇩🇪 (@mysk_co) November 3, 2022

The software firm Mysk’s Tommy Mysk and Talal Haj Bakry, who work as app developers and security experts, recently discovered that iOS transmits “every touch you make” to Apple from within one of the business’s own applications.

The developers claim that efforts to prevent collecting this data, such as using the Settings option to “block the sharing of Device Analytics completely,” did not affect the data’s transmission.

Additionally, the data being gathered is quite thorough. The App Store app on an iPhone would send a user’s search information, what they clicked on, and how long they spent looking at an app in real-time to Apple, as noted by Gizmodo. Utilizing the Apple Stocks app?

The user’s monitored stocks, articles they read in-app, and the names of any stocks they looked up will all be sent to Apple. Also transmitted along are the timestamps for when a user reads stock information.

Even more specific information on the user’s iPhone, including the model, screen resolution, and keyboard language, is gathered by a few Apple apps.

Mysk performed the test using an iPhone running iOS 14.6 that had been jailbroken. With an iPhone running iOS 16 that wasn’t hacked, the researchers saw identical iPhone behaviour.

Mysk was unable to precisely identify the data being transferred on the device running the most recent operating system owing to encryption.

Apple’s conduct allegedly violated the California Invasion of Privacy Act, according to a class action complaint filed on Thursday. The fact that Apple is gathering this data is not a major focus of the case.

The lawsuit focuses on Apple settings that give consumers the impression that they may turn off such monitoring, including “Allow Apps to Request to Track” and “Share Analytics.”

The fact that Apple, or any digital business, gathers user data shouldn’t come as much of a surprise.

Although users have the ability to turn off data collection in their settings, as the team at Mysk found, Apple is still collecting this information, perhaps providing consumers with a false feeling of privacy.

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