A new lawsuit is taking on Apple's data collection practices in the wake of a report by independent researchers who found Apple was continuing to track consumers in its mobile apps even when they had explicitly configured their iPhone privacy settings to turn tracking off The California Invasion of Privacy Act is the subject of a proposed class action lawsuit.
As reported last week by Gizmodo, app developers and independent researchers Tommy Mysk and Talal Haj Bakry discovered that Apple was still collecting data about its users across a number of first-party apps. The researchers found that disabling this setting and other privacy controls didn't affect Apple's data collection.
What app users tapped on, what they searched, what ads they saw, how long they looked at a given app's page, and how the app was discovered were all tracked by the App Store. Information that was sent by the app included ID numbers, type of phone, screen resolution, keyboard languages and more.
If a user turns off either the iPad or the iPhone, a message will be sent to them telling them that Apple will no longer allow the sharing of the data. Users are left to believe that Apple wouldn't collect their data if they turned off other settings. The lawsuit states that Apple records consumers' app usage, app browsing communications, and personal information in its proprietary Apple apps.
What data was being collected was specified in the complaint. Users were being tracked, for instance, their watchlists, the names of stocks they viewed and searched for, and news articles they saw. The suit states that Apple would be able to track users across its apps if most of the apps shared the same ID numbers.
According to the lawsuit, Apple's assurances about privacy are "utterly false." It was found that the level of data collection was out of line with industry practices as both Microsoft Edge and Google Chrome could not collect the same type of data if they turned off their own analytic settings.
The data Apple collects is exactly the type of private, personal information consumers wish and expect to protect when they take the steps Apple sets out for them to control the private information Apple collects.
The lawsuit needs to be certified as a class action in order to get compensation and other relief.
Apple didn't reply to the request for comment.
Apple said it would give users more control over how their data was used in personalized advertising if the data was accurate. Critics have pointed out that ATT hurt the advertising businesses of major tech companies, like Meta andSnapchat, while Apple's own advertising market share increased.
The launch of ATT allowed Apple to join the Facebook (now Meta)-Google advertising duopoly by growing its adoption by 4 percentage points. Meta has been saying for a long time that Apple's ATT would cut into its ad revenues and have a $10 billion impact in 2022.
New ad slots on the App Store were rolled out to take advantage of Apple's improved stance in the ad industry. Many developers were distressed to find that their ad slots were being sold to gambling app makers.
The launch of ATT and the growth of its App Store business has given Apple significant power in the app market. The company is fighting a lawsuit over App Store fees and Apple's alleged antitrust behavior. The DOJ is said to be drafting an antitrust lawsuit against Apple.
If the researchers' findings turn out to be correct, this latest lawsuit has the potential for bigger implications.
One year later, Apple’s privacy changes helped boost its own ads business, report finds
The case was filed in the US District Court for the Northern District of California.
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