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As Steve Jobs once said: “Who wants a pop-up?(…) yuck. » Or was he referring to an iPhone stylist? Either way, if you’re an avid app downloader, you’ll probably be annoyed by the amount of app tracking prompts that appear. The one that asks if you allow the app to “track your activity across other companies’ apps and websites.” You tap “Ask app not to track” and continue, but a few minutes later another app shows you the same prompt.
You’ll be happy to know that there is a way for iPhone to automatically default to “no” and never see these prompts again…
You are the product
Behind the scenes, it’s Apple’s App Tracking Transparency (ATT) framework at work. Introduced in iOS 14.5, when an app wants to access your device’s advertising identifier (IDFA) to track you across other apps and websites, it must first ask for it. This was a blow at the time for Facebook and Instagram, who even encouraged users to enable tracking so that their apps remained “free.” The company lost approximately $12.8 billion in 2022 alone because of iOS 14.5’s implementation of ATT.
More importantly, it represented a huge victory for user privacy at the time. Previously, apps had free scope to collect your age, gender, location, usage habits, purchases, browsing habits, ads clicked, and more. This is data gold for brokers looking to build a profile on you for targeted advertising.
Today, device fingerprinting is the most widely used method and collects details such as your screen size, operating system version, time zone and probably more. Apps have also moved to contextual advertising, which tracks what you do within their app rather than between apps.
Overall, both are less desirable than obtaining a user’s IDFA, which still sells to ad networks for big money. Protect your anonymity.
Fixed automatic default setting to “no”
It’s important to note that disabling this setting doesn’t just hide the prompt. It will tell the operating system to automatically deny the request on your behalf.
Go to Settings > Privacy & Security > Trackingand return it “Allow apps to request tracking » disable.
That’s really it. Now every app on your iPhone now receives an automatic “no” whenever it tries to ask.
For developers, the API returns a permission denied status. For users, tracking is denied before the prompt is triggered.
A pro tip for a quieter, more private experience on iPhone.
Security Bite is 9to5Mac’s weekly deep dive into the world of Apple security. Every week, Arin Waichulis uncovers new threats, privacy tips and concerns, vulnerabilities and more, shaping an ecosystem of more than 2 billion devices.
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