According to new research, some apps continue to track users despite improved iOS privacy measures.
Since the introduction of App Tracking Transparency (ATT) in iOS 14.5, every iPhone and iPad app must now ask users whether they want to be tracked or not.
Some developers, however, have discovered new ways to follow iOS users even when they opt out of being tracked by third-party apps.
According to a new independent study (via Ars Technica), these developers have been circumventing the new iOS privacy measures to identify and monitor users even when they don’t want to.
While ATT is effective, it still has significant flaws that allow applications to capture data from the user’s device without them knowing.
The researchers looked at nine iOS applications that used server-side code to establish a user identity even when App Tracking was turned off. The code appears to have been given by a subsidiary of the Chinese corporation Alibaba, which can trace this identity across apps. As a consequence, advertising firms can still tailor material to a specific user.
The study analyzed 1,759 applications before and after ATT was made available to iOS users. Despite the fact that a quarter of these applications promise not to collect any user data, 80 percent of them include at least one tracking library.
