Apple Sued for Allegedly Deceiving Users With Privacy Settings

[Lakados]

https://www.apple.com/legal/privacy/data/en/apple-advertising/

Apple Advertising & Privacy​

Apple-delivered advertising helps people discover apps, products, and services while respecting user privacy. Apple’s advertising platform is designed to protect your information and give you control over how we use your information. Our advertising platform doesn’t share personally identifiable information with third parties.


Ads that are delivered by Apple’s advertising platform may appear on the App Store, Apple News, and Stocks. Apple’s advertising platform does not track you, meaning that it does not link user or device data collected from our apps with user or device data collected from third parties for targeted advertising or advertising measurement purposes, and does not share user or device data with data brokers.
Contextual Information
Contextual information may be used to serve ads to you, such as:

• Device Information: Your keyboard language settings, device type, OS version, mobile carrier, and connection type.
• Device Location: If Location Services is turned on and you’ve granted permission to the App Store or Apple News apps to access your location, your location may be used to serve you geographically relevant ads. Your precise device location is not stored by Apple’s advertising platform, and profiles are not constructed from this information. To access these settings, go to Settings > Privacy & Security > Location Services.
• App Store: Your query when you perform a search, and information about the page you are viewing may be used to serve you a relevant ad.
• Apple News and Stocks: The type of story you read may be used to select appropriate ads.

Segments
We create segments, which are groups of people who share similar characteristics, and use these groups for delivering targeted ads. Information about you may be used to determine which segments you’re assigned to, and thus, which ads you receive. To protect your privacy, targeted ads are delivered only if more than 5,000 people meet the targeting criteria.
We may use information such as the following to assign you to segments:

• Account Information: Your name, address, age, gender, and devices registered to your Apple ID account. Information such as your first name in your Apple ID registration page or salutation in your Apple ID account may be used to derive your gender. You can update your account information on the Apple ID website.
• Downloads, Purchases & Subscriptions: The music, movies, books, TV shows, and apps you download, as well as any in-app purchases and subscriptions. We don’t allow targeting based on downloads of a specific app or purchases within a specific app (including subscriptions) from the App Store, unless the targeting is done by that app’s developer.
• Apple News and Stocks: The topics and categories of the stories you read and the publications you follow, subscribe to, or turn on notifications from.
• Advertising: Your interactions with ads delivered by Apple’s advertising platform.

When selecting which ad to display from multiple ads for which you are eligible, we may use some of the above-mentioned information, as well as your App Store searches and browsing activity, to determine which ad is likely to be most relevant to you. App Store browsing activity includes the content and apps you tap and view while browsing the App Store. This information is aggregated across users so that it does not identify you. We may also use local, on-device processing to select which ad to display, using information stored on your device, such as the apps you frequently open.
Apple’s advertising platforms receive information about the ads you tap and view against a random identifier not tied to your Apple ID.
Apple does not share any personally identifiable information with third parties. We are obligated to make certain non-personal information available to strategic partners that work with Apple to provide our products and services, help Apple market to customers, and sell ads on Apple’s behalf. No Apple Pay transactions or Health app data is accessible to Apple’s advertising platform, or is used for advertising purposes. Apple does not know or make available to advertisers information about your sexual orientation, religious beliefs, or political affiliations.
Advertising Preferences
About This Ad
To understand why a specific ad was shown to you on the App Store, Apple News, or Stocks, tap the Ad button on the ad. This will present the segments and other data, such as demographic information, that were used to determine which ad you received.
Ad Targeting Information
To see information about you that may be used to deliver targeted ads by Apple’s advertising platform, including the segments that you are in.
To see this information on your iOS or iPadOS device, go to Settings > Privacy & Security > Apple Advertising and tap View Ad Targeting Information. On Mac, go to System Settings > Privacy & Security > Privacy, click Apple Advertising, then click View Ad Targeting Information.
If you believe information about you is inaccurate, you can update your Apple ID account information.
Location-Based Ads
If you allow App Store or Apple News to access to your location, Apple’s advertising platform may use the approximate current location of your device to provide you with geographically targeted ads on the App Store and on Apple News.
You can opt out of location-based app functionality including for advertising on your iOS or iPadOS device by going to Settings > Privacy & Security > Location Services, and either tapping to turn off Location Services or selecting App Store or News from the list of location-aware switches and setting it to Never. On Mac, go to System Settings > Privacy & Security > Privacy, click Location Services, and deselect either “Enable Location Services” or “News.”
Apple’s advertising platform does not receive location-based information when you turn off Location Services on your device.
Personalized Ads
If Personalized Ads is turned on, Apple’s advertising platform may use your information to serve ads that are more relevant to you. Turning off Personalized Ads will prevent Apple from using this information for ad targeting. It may not decrease the number of ads you receive, but the ads may be less relevant to you.
You can turn off Personalized Ads on your iOS or iPadOS device by going to Settings > Privacy & Security > Apple Advertising and tapping to turn off Personalized Ads. On Mac, go to System Settings > Privacy & Security > Privacy, click Apple Advertising, and deselect Personalized Ads. The Personalized Ads option may be unavailable if you are a minor, have a managed account, or are in a location where Apple does not deliver advertising to its apps.
Preventing Fraud and Other Malicious Activity
To help identify and prevent fraud and other malicious activity within ads, Apple’s advertising platform may use information about your searches on the App Store, the ads you view and tap, and the apps you purchase and download from ads. This information is collected against a random identifier not tied to your Apple ID.
At all times, information collected by Apple will be treated in accordance with Apple’s Privacy Policy, which can be found at www.apple.com/privacy
Published Date: September 12, 2022

 

[Lakados]

The only thing I see here is the independent researchers have managed to prove that Apple does exactly what they say they do in their Advertising Policy.

 

[MrGuvernment]

Newsflash: Everything is spying on you nowadays.
Also Newsflash: Google sells your data to 3rd parties.
Another Newsflash: Apple DOES NOT sell your data to 3rd parties.

That's the difference.

If you don't want to have your data collected, feel free to log off the internet, shut down your device, and move to log cabin where you can hunt for your own food, chop your own wood, and make everything you need from scratch. As soon as you purchase something, you will be back on the map and being tracked again.

I would say you should move to Mars, but the truth is we have so many satellites orbiting that planet looking for signs of life that you will probably be tracked even harder there... ads attempting to sell you water and air.

Ya Apple just lets 3rd party contractors access the data they collected via Siri and listen to it, with what seemed to be no precautions about protecting said data...

UnknownSouljer appreciate that break down as it does make sense. Now, how does it work for companies to advertise with Apple? How does a company get to determine who will see their ad's ? Apple must provide some base info or a questionaire as to what type of audience one wants and then they spam the ads to the people their (Apple) data fits into?
You always hear people saying "Apple does not sell your data", Apple cleared lied about this "everything stays on your phone" so what else are they blowing smoke around? Just like "Apple devices" do not need anti-virus" Oh wait, we had several pages on our support portal about installing not 1, but 2! But once that came out in the media, disappeared real quick to keep the false sense of security Apple OS's are perfectly secure!

While it is definitely in their interst to control the data, which controls the marketing to their rules, could they not pass off these profits via other services via 3rd parties to not show as obvious, but still be legal, or I guess that may look interesting if some contracted 3rd party "data analytics" company is paying Apple 100's of millions for certain services....

madpistol It does not make it right though. This is the fight right now, instead of just bending over and taking it from behind from these companies, things need to change for the better, and so long as people like you just go extreme on the other edge of "disconnect from everything!" things wont change, so stop accepting the status quo and instead work to try and get change.

At least people are trying, if it fails, well, we tried, but better than doing nothing at all, cause doing nothing means you have already lost.

 

[MrGuvernment]

The only thing I see here is the independent researchers have managed to prove that Apple does exactly what they say they do in their Advertising Policy.

Which is good if they have been audited by external 3rd parties, not paid for by Apple.

Our advertising platform doesn’t share personally identifiable information with third parties.

We also know though this is mostly BS, enough data points allows anyone to be reverse identified. anonymized data has be shown to be inaccurate.

 

[MrGuvernment]

So back to that and trusting Apple:

https://securityaffairs.co/wordpress/138884/digital-id/iphone-found-collecting-personal-data.html
https://twitter.com/mysk_co/status/1594515229915979776?ref_src=twsrc^tfw|twcamp^tweetembed|twterm^1594515229915979776|twgr^718548df14e4e446ae4e38dd708b272975354fb3|twcon^s1_&ref_url=https://securityaffairs.co/wordpress/138884/digital-id/iphone-found-collecting-personal-data.html

Researchers discovered that analytics data associated with iPhone include Directory Services Identifier (DSID) that could allow identifying users.​

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Researchers at software company Mysk discovered that analytics data collected by iPhone include the Directory Services Identifier (DSID), which could allow identifying users.


Apple collects both DSID and Apple ID, which means that it can use the former to identify the user and retrieve associated personal information, including full name, phone number, birth date, email, and address.


“Apple uses DSID to uniquely identify Apple ID accounts. DSID is associated with your name, email, and any data in your iCloud account. This is a screenshot of an API call to iCloud, and DSID it can be clearly seen alongside a user’s personal data” reads a Tweet by Mysk.

Lies and more lies?

​

 

[Lakados]

So back to that and trusting Apple:

https://securityaffairs.co/wordpress/138884/digital-id/iphone-found-collecting-personal-data.html
https://twitter.com/mysk_co/status/1594515229915979776?ref_src=twsrc^tfw|twcamp^tweetembed|twterm^1594515229915979776|twgr^718548df14e4e446ae4e38dd708b272975354fb3|twcon^s1_&ref_url=https://securityaffairs.co/wordpress/138884/digital-id/iphone-found-collecting-personal-data.html

Researchers discovered that analytics data associated with iPhone include Directory Services Identifier (DSID) that could allow identifying users.​

​

Lies and more lies?
View attachment 529127

​

The DSID ties back to your Apple ID account, which you freely give to Apple already, it isn't new information, but a 3'rd party can't identify your Apple ID account nor its details from the DSID.
So if I create a new Apple ID account and register it to [email protected] and then fill in that profile with whatever data I choose too, Apple then assigns that AppleID account a random DSID which they can identify internally but a 3'rd party couldn't. In either event, they aren't collecting anything, you already gave them that information when you created the account, it is Apple's own internal identifier.

 

[madpistol]

The DSID ties back to your Apple ID account, which you freely give to Apple already, it isn't new information, but a 3'rd party can't identify your Apple ID account nor its details from the DSID.
So if I create a new Apple ID account and register it to [email protected] and then fill in that profile with whatever data I choose too, Apple then assigns that AppleID account a random DSID which they can identify internally but a 3'rd party couldn't. In either event, they aren't collecting anything, you already gave them that information when you created the account, it is Apple's own internal identifier.

I think many people don't understand the distinction. Data gathered from your device is worth something, but as long as it can't be linked to PII, it's very difficult to identify who actually generated the data. Even Apple themselves are careful to lock down devices and basically throw away the encryption key; if you can't get into it, nobody can... not even Apple.

Google links PII to data and sells it. That's what you should be worried about.



If you haven't familiarized yourself with the field of Data Science, go read about it. That stuff will scare you to death as it is literally being used to try and predict human actions. Link that stuff to PII (like Google does) and you can literally start drawing a life story for a person... if you have enough info.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_science

 

[MrGuvernment]

The DSID ties back to your Apple ID account, which you freely give to Apple already, it isn't new information, but a 3'rd party can't identify your Apple ID account nor its details from the DSID.
So if I create a new Apple ID account and register it to [email protected] and then fill in that profile with whatever data I choose too, Apple then assigns that AppleID account a random DSID which they can identify internally but a 3'rd party couldn't. In either event, they aren't collecting anything, you already gave them that information when you created the account, it is Apple's own internal identifier.

But Apple themselves state they do not collect anything that can identify you? I understand the giving of the data, but then Apple is taking different data and then combining it on their end which in turn = identifies you.

The point here being, Apple is not being 100% transparent with their claims, they say one thing, the average user of their devices understands as very clear , but then they are actually doing something else...

 

[Lakados]

But Apple themselves state they do not collect anything that can identify you? I understand the giving of the data, but then Apple is taking different data and then combining it on their end which in turn = identifies you.

The point here being, Apple is not being 100% transparent with their claims, they say one thing, the average user of their devices understands as very clear , but then they are actually doing something else...

No... Apple isn't collecting anything, it is already collected, there is no new information given. It is the equivalent of saying Mastercard collects your card number when you purchase something with Mastercard.
The DSID internally to Apple does correlate back to your iTunes account, but Apple does not want to share your account information or details, so instead they only pass around the DSID which is useless to anybody except Apple.
This forces App developers and advertisers to go through Apple without getting access to any of your data.
By using and passing around the DSID in the Appstore, developers must go through Apple for any advertisements and it prevents them from being able to advertise to you directly unless you choose to provide the developer with your contact information.
It is a tool Apple uses to ensure vendor lock-in, the fact it serves as a method for enforcing anonymity is a bonus at best.