In 2014, some very pervy creeps stole some very private iCloud images from some very high-profile celebs and put them on the open net, creating one very particular PR disaster for Apple’s CEO, Tim Cook. The firm was about to roll out Apple Pay as a part of its newest software program replace, a course of that took greater than a decade bringing high-profile payment processors and retailers on board. The solely concern was that nobody appeared to need their bank card particulars within the arms of the identical firm whose service had been used to steal dozens of nude images of Jennifer Lawrence only a week earlier.

Apple desperately wanted a rebrand, and that’s precisely what we obtained. Within days, the corporate rolled out a polished promotional campaign—full with a brand new website and an open letter from Cook himself—explaining the corporate’s beefed-up privateness prowess, and the safeguards adopted within the wake of that leak. Apple wasn’t solely an organization you may belief, Cook mentioned, it was arguably the firm—not like the opposite guys (*cough* Facebook *cough*) who constructed their Silicon Valley empires off of pawning your information to advertising corporations, Apple’s enterprise mannequin is constructed off of “selling great products,” no data-mining wanted.

That advert marketing campaign’s been taking part in out for the final seven years, and by all accounts, it’s worked. It’s labored effectively sufficient that in 2021, we belief Apple with our bank card data, our private well being data, and most of what’s inside our properties. And when Tim Cook decried issues just like the “data-industrial complex” in interviews earlier this yr after which rolled out a slew of iOS updates meant to provide customers the ability they deserved, we up to date our iPhones and felt a tiny bit safer.

The App Tracking Transparency (ATT) settings that got here bundled in an iOS 14 replace gave iPhone customers all over the place the ability to inform their favourite apps (and Facebook) to knock off the entire monitoring factor. Saying no, Apple promised, would cease these apps from monitoring you as you browse the net, and thru different apps in your telephone. Well, it seems that wasn’t fairly the case. The Washington Post was first to report on a research study that put Apple’s ATT characteristic to the check, and located the setting… just about ineffective. As the researchers put it:

In our exams of ten top-ranked apps, we discovered no significant distinction in third-party monitoring exercise when selecting App Tracking Transparency’s “Ask App Not To Track.” The variety of energetic third-party trackers was equivalent no matter a consumer’s ATT selection, and the variety of monitoring makes an attempt was solely barely (~13%) decrease when the consumer selected “Ask App Not To Track”.

So, what the hell occurred? In quick, ATT addresses one particular (and highly effective) piece of digital information that advertisers use to determine your particular system—and your particular id—throughout a number of websites and companies: the so-called ID for Advertisers, or IDFA. Telling an app to not observe severs their entry to this identifier, which is why corporations like Facebook lost their minds over these modifications. Without the IDFA, Facebook had no method to know whether or not, say, an Instagram advert translated right into a sale on some third-party platform, or whether or not you downloaded an app due to an advert you noticed in your information feed.

Luckily for mentioned corporations (however unluckily for us), monitoring doesn’t begin and finish with the IDFA. Fingerprinting—or cobbling collectively a bunch of disparate bits of cellular information to uniquely determine your system—has come up as a pretty popular alternative to some main digital advert corporations, which finally led Apple to inform them to knock that shit off. But as a result of “fingerprinting” encompasses so many alternative varieties of information in so many alternative contexts (and may go by many alternative names), nobody knocked anything off. And exterior of 1 or two banned apps, Apple actually didn’t seem to care.

“Apple believes that tracking should be transparent to users and under their control,” an Apple spokesperson informed Gizmodo. “When the user selects ‘Ask App Not to Track,’ the app is informed that the user would not like to be tracked by any means, and all developers—including Apple—are strictly required to comply with the user’s choice. If we discover that a developer is not honoring the user’s choice, we will work with the developer to address the issue, or they will be removed from the App Store.”

It’s the identical assertion the corporate supplied the Post when it reached out to ask why asking a few of these apps to not “track” resulted in these apps sending a slew of information to 3rd social gathering advertising corporations, anyway. In some circumstances, this included the whole lot from the cell provider an individual used to the entire cupboard space on their system, which may very well be cobbled collectively to create that particular person’s distinctive “fingerprint.”

Apple responded by telling the Post that it will “[reach] out to these companies to understand what information they are collecting and how they are sharing it,” earlier than… seemingly doing the identical load of nothing it was doing up to now. As the Post writes, these apps have been unchanged even weeks after Apple’s assertion.

It’s a transfer that appears distinctly un-Apple, contemplating the corporate’s years-long try to place itself as Silicon Valley privateness protector. But maybe Apple, which is staring down antitrust investigations in multiple countries because of the firm’s ironclad grip on its App Store, doesn’t wish to crack down on builders who skate across the IDFA by snatching up different bits of information due to the place that may lead. One of the antitrust cases compelled the corporate to concede a few of its management—over in-app funds, specifically—final month.

Some Apple critics within the advertising world have been elevating pink flags for months about potential antitrust points with Apple’s ATT rollout, and it’s not onerous to see why. It gave Apple unique entry to a very highly effective piece of intel on all of its prospects, the IDFA, whereas leaving competing tech corporations scrambling for no matter scraps of information they’ll discover. If all of these scraps change into Apple’s sole property, too, that’s virtually begging for much more antitrust scrutiny to be thrown its means. What Apple appears to be doing here’s what any of us would seemingly do in its state of affairs: choosing its battles.