[HN Gopher] Study: Effectiveness of Apple's app tracking transpa...
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       Study: Effectiveness of Apple's app tracking transparency
        
       Author : clircle
       Score  : 24 points
       Date   : 2022-02-16 17:44 UTC (5 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (blog.lockdownprivacy.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (blog.lockdownprivacy.com)
        
       | bmarquez wrote:
       | I use Lockdown for iOS, and Blokada or TrackerControl on Android
       | (they're all very similar, on-device vpn + block list).
       | 
       | Even with tracking disabled, apps will still contact third party
       | ad/tracking servers. Just this morning on iOS:
       | 
       | - app-measurement.com
       | 
       | - play.googleapis.com
       | 
       | - googleads.g.doubleclick.net
       | 
       | - mobile-collector.newrelic.com
       | 
       | - inapps.appsflyer.com
       | 
       | - api.mixpanel.com
       | 
       | - graph.facebook.com (this is a major offender, even if you don't
       | have Facebook apps installed, other apps love to feed FB data)
        
       | jcranberry wrote:
       | > It relies too heavily on trusting the very tracking companies
       | that the policies are supposed to be protecting users against:
       | Apple's definition allows apps to secretly send any and all of
       | your data to third parties, and as long as those third parties
       | publicly claim they won't link your data to other sites or sell
       | it, it's not considered "tracking" by Apple. It is a 100% trust-
       | based honor system, which means that the only way for these
       | companies to get caught "tracking" is to literally pen a public
       | confession of guilt or wrongdoing -- something that profit-driven
       | companies are not exactly known for doing.
       | 
       | >...
       | 
       | >Not only do these trackers allow their clients to break Apple's
       | rules, but they specifically built features to help their clients
       | easily circumvent Apple's ATT privacy rules.
       | 
       | >First, we created a dummy app that used the Kochava tracking
       | service. With just a few clicks, we configured Kochava to violate
       | Apple's "ATT Opt-Out" by asking it to tracking users across apps
       | (using "IP address" and "User Agent") for the purpose of ad
       | targeting ("Paid Media"). Basically, Kochava made it really
       | convenient for any app developer to violate even Apple's narrow
       | definition of tracking.
       | 
       | >We later performed the same test with the AppsFlyer tracking
       | service (which, as previously mentioned, hides the data it sends
       | off your device), and it was even easier to enable "privacy cheat
       | mode" and track users against their consent -- all it took was
       | clicking a single button.
       | 
       | Wow.
        
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       (page generated 2022-02-16 23:03 UTC)