According to The Financial Times, Apple's privacy policies allow apps to continue tracking users even if they have asked to not be tracked.
In May, Apple launched its App Tracking transparency feature that allows users to opt out of being tracked across apps and websites for advertising purposes. After Apple introduced the feature seven months ago, companies such as Facebook andSnapchat have been allowed to continue sharing user-level signals from their phones, if the data is not linked to specific user profiles.
The Financial Times said that Apple's position was the result of an unacknowledged shift that lets companies follow a much looser interpretation of its controversial privacy policy. Developers interpreted Apple's instructions to mean that they can still observe signals and behaviors from groups of users, even if they don't derive data from a device for the purpose of uniquely identifying it.
Apple does not endorse these techniques, but they allow third parties to track users regardless of whether or not they have given consent. Even though some of the user-level data is passed onto advertisers, Apple still trusts apps to collect user-level data.
The company told investors that it will give advertisers a more complete, real-time view of the success of ad campaigns by sharing data from its 306 million users. The company's operations chief said that Facebook is undertaking a "multiyear effort" to rebuild ad infrastructure.
In June, Apple faced pressure to tighten the rules around App Tracking transparency after it was found that third parties were using workarounds to identify users who do not consent to be tracked, but there have been no changes around looser "probabilistic" methods of user identification.
