Hey smores, I'm Shannon Morse, welcome to Morse Code.
Apple recently released iOS 14.5 to the public and with it, they also introduced
a new Privacy feature called App Tracking Transparency. Why does this matter? Well,
this lets you know if third party apps are tracking you and lets you opt out of the tracking.
Apps can track your movements within the apps themselves but also outside of your app,
after you've left your activity within the app. That's why you might see ads for
IKEA on Instagram after talking about IKEA on twitter. Well, it's one of the reasons.
A lot of tracking is generally harmless and is used to create better user interfaces by
developers, or add and remove features in apps, gps apps depend on your coordinates to function
and give you correct information for example... but in a report by Washington Post back in 2019,
they found a regular iPhone could have about 5400 different app trackers sending data - of course,
this does depend on which apps you've installed on your phone
and how they've implemented data sharing. It's likely most of that is harmless, but it's still
data about you that is being sent up to other parties. It could be used to serve up ads to you,
for example, or to marketing and research firms. And it's not all that transparent,
hence Apple's response in the past couple of years to make this practice more transparent. According
to Apple, this is why they're introducing the new App Tracking Transparency feature.
Originally, this feature to add transparency was supposed to be released with iOS 14 in the
fall of last year but Apple delayed the release to give developers time to prepare and comply.
So if any app developers are acting all angry at Apple about this update *cough* FACEBOOK,
they've known about it for at least half a year and have had plenty of time to
comply. In my humble opinion, they're mad because they make money off of your data.
If you've already been using iOS 14 with a lot of privacy settings enabled,
then you may find that the new option after updating is grayed
out. This doesn't appear to be an issue but may cause some confusion. Before you update:
If you go into your settings, choose privacy, and check the Apple Advertising option,
then that toggle for Personalized Ads. If this toggle is enabled, then App Tracking Transparency
is also enabled. If the Personalized Ads option is off, then App Tracking Transparency is also off.
To update to iOS 14.5: Go to Settings, General, Software Update, Download and
Install. You can also turn on Automatic Updates. On the new iOS settings, when you
install a new app, you will automatically be asked whether you want that app to track you or not.
I'll show you how to adjust the settings in a moment, so stay tuned.
The toggle should be enabled with iOS 14.5 by default. You can decide which apps are
allowed to track you and which ones cannot. You can also disable tracking altogether within
Privacy settings on iOS. Once you have iOS 14.5 installed, the first time you open an app, you'll
see a prompt that says "Allow APP to track your activity across other companies apps and websites?
And then a description saying what that tracking will be used for, should the app developer choose
to include that." and two options will be available - Ask App Not To Track OR Allow.
Some apps won't function properly if you don't allow them to track - like GPS apps - so you
may want to hit allow for those - but what I would do is just Ask App Not To Track for ALL
apps, then turn them back on on a case by case basis
IF they need trackers to work. OR I would turn off their ability to track altogether.
If you ALLOW tracking for an app, it will appear
in your Tracking settings and you can manage those at anytime.
Go to Settings Scroll to find Privacy and click it
Choose Tracking at the top The default setting is to allow
apps to ask for permission to track you Toggle it off to block all apps from being
able to track you, which will also block them from even asking to track
You'll notice a list of apps below that setting if an app has been allowed to track you.
You can immediately block these apps from further tracking by switching the toggle to OFF.
If you accidentally opt out of tracking or accidentally allow tracking, you can
always go into your settings and change it, or redownload an app to see the prompt again.
You may not see this setting immediately, and I definitely didn't. Don't panic - the
OS is working as expected - it's just that some apps have not agreed to make
this feature go live yet. But until they do, they're totally blocked from tracking a user
using Apple's Identifier for Advertisers (called the IDFA). Eventually though,
you will start seeing the prompt, if apps want to use that data to track you.
Fellow tech youtuber Lance Somoza of One-Tech Mind pointed me to this ongoing list of apps
that request tracking. It appears a lot of folks are still not seeing these prompts even if the
settings are correctly enabled, myself included. I was able to recreate any the fixes with success,
once apple pushed another ios update a few days ago. I'll be turning off tracking entirely.
So, this is a great step in the right direction for transparency and also making users aware that
apps do this kind of tracking. Have you seen the new prompts yet? Comment below and let me know!
Special thanks to my Patreon supporters, buy me a coffee team, and members who joined my
youtube channel to get access to exclusive perks. Props to Makattak, Charles B, Marc W
and Derra Dune for the support this week! I'm Shannon Morse and I'll see ya soon. Bye yall!