An interesting new study of 1,759 iOS apps before and after Apple implemented a major privacy feature last year which required developers to ask permission to track app users has found the measure has made tracking more difficult.
The researchers found that many apps still collect tracking data despite the user having asked the apps not to be tracked.
They found evidence of app makers using server-side code to circumvent Apple's privacy policies, suggesting that the move by Apple may be motivating a counter movement.
We found a real-world example of Umeng, a subsidiary of the Chinese tech company, using their server-side code to provide apps with a cross-app identifier. ATT might encourage a shift of tracking technologies behind the scenes so that they are outside of Apple's reach. Apple's new rules may lead to less transparency around tracking than we currently have.
The paper is called "Goodbye Tracking?" The work of four academics affiliated with the University of Oxford and a fifth independent U.S.-based researcher is called Impact of iOS App Tracking transparency and Privacy Labels. It has not yet been peer reviewed because it was published as a pre-print.
Note that this is still a pre-print, and there might be minor changes of the paper until publication.
We analysed two versions of 1,759 iOS apps from the UK App Store: one version from before iOS 14 and one that has been updated to comply with the new rules.
— Konrad Kollnig (@FascinatingTech) April 8, 2022
The privacy nutrition labels that Apple introduced at the end of 2020 were found to be inaccurate by the researchers.
Apple requires app developers to self-declare how they process user data in order to provide an at-a-glance overview of how much data they give up to use an app. The researchers found that there were discrepancies between the apps that were disclosed and the actual data practices.
Our findings suggest that tracking companies, especially larger ones with access to large troves of first party, still track users behind the scenes, and that INRDeals INRDeals INRDeals INRDeals INRDeals INRDeals INRDeals INRDeals INRDeals INRDeals INRDeals INRDeals INRDeals INRDeals INRDeals INRDeals INRDeals INRDeals INRDeals INRDeals INRDeals INRDeals INRDeals INRDeals INRDeals INRDeals INRDeals INRDeals INRDeals
It would be possible to analyse user behaviour across apps and websites with further user and device characteristics that are still widely collected by tracking companies. A direct result of the ATT is that existing power imbalances in the digital tracking ecosystem get reinforced.
The paper suggests that Apple and other large companies have been able to increase their market power as a result of implementing measures like ATT which give users more agency.
At the time of writing, Apple hadn't responded to the contact for comment on the paper.
France’s competition authority declines to block Apple’s opt-in consent for iOS app tracking
Competition authorities have already received a number of complaints about Apple.
While a separate plan by the tech giant to deprecate support for tracking cookies in its Chrome browser and switch to alternative ad targeting technologies has been targeted.
Competition regulators have blocked both Apple and ATT's self-styled Privacy Sandbox. The interventions are likely to have contributed to the delay.
At the time it announced the investigation, the EU stressed that any decision would need to consider user privacy as well.
The approach taken by the U.K.'s competition and privacy regulators has been used in the Privacy Sandbox procedure. In an opinion last year, the outgoing U.K. information commissioner told the adtech industry it needed to move away from tracking and profiling-based ad targeting.
The researchers think that Apple's ATT could improve access to permanent user IDs over time.
They think that this migration away from tracking will concentrate the market power of platform gatekeepers.
The reduced access to non-probabilistic cross-app identifiers might make it hard for data brokers and other smaller tracker companies to compete. They suggest that privacy-preserving, on-device solutions may be more competitive than techniques like fingerprinting and cohort tracking.
The net result of this shift towards more privacy preserving methods is likely going to be more concentration with the existing platform gatekeepers, as the early reports on the tripled marketing share of Apple, the planned overhaul of advertising technologies by Facebook/Meta and others, suggest. Advertisers will rely on the advertising technologies of the larger tech companies in order to continue targeting the right audiences because being some of the wealthiest individuals will be an opportunity that many advertisers cannot miss out on.
The failure of European regulators and policymakers to crack down on tracking by enforcing privacy laws such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is also called out in the paper. This shows the power of these companies and the failure of regulators to enforce the law adequately. An effective approach to increase compliance with data protection law and privacy protections in practice might be more targeted regulation of the app industry.
Targeted regulation is coming down the pipe. The orders of magnitude slower than the ads which get auctioned off and microtargeted at eyeballs every day.
The Digital Markets Act, the European Union's flagship ex ante competition reform, is expected to come into force in October after a political agreement was reached last month. Although it is unlikely to really kick in until 2023, there is already debate over whether the Commission has enough resources to enforce against some of the world's most valuable companies with their expanding armies of in-house lawyers.
The U.K. has its own version of Big Tech competition reform. Legislation to empower the Digital Markets Unit is still pending, but the regime was trailed back in 2020. The Digital Competition Bill will not be presented to parliament until next year, according to recent reports in the U.K. press.
Germany passed a competition reform at the beginning of last year. Earlier this year, it was identified as being subject to the special abuse control regime. The country's FCO still needs to complete the work of investigating the various products that are causing it competition concern. It is possible that we will see some targeted enforcements by the FCO this year.
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