If you work in advertising or marketing, you’re probably aware of Apple’s privacy efforts over the last year. Apple now requires apps ask customers if they want to 'opt-in' to allow behavioral data tracking. If you’re an Apple customer, you may also think you have control over which apps are tracking you around the internet.Or do you? We did some research to find out if perceptions match reality.
The release of iOS 15.2 introduced a new Record App Activity feature that lets you see which apps communicate to various networks. Sometimes these contacts are to the app’s own domain, but more often these contacts are to third-party domains, and it’s not clear what data is being shared.
We used this new privacy feature to take a snapshot of network connections across 200 apps and 20 different app categories. Our goal was to glean some insight into where the industry is at this moment when it comes to tracking consumers around the internet while also trying to move to a non-PII framework.