iPhone Apps Secretly Collect Data While Sending You Notifications: Researchers
Some security researchers at Mysk Inc., an app development company have revealed that iPhone apps including Facebook, LinkedIn, TikTok, and X/Twitter are evading Apple’s privacy rules to collect user data through notifications. Users think that closing apps will stop companies from collecting data in the background, however, this technique gets around that safety as well. According to the researchers, the data is unnecessary for processing notifications & looks related to analytics and advertising. Tommy Mysk conducted the tests along with Talal Haj Bakry. He stated:
“It’s par for the course that apps would find opportunities to sneak in more data collection. Who would have known that an innocuous action as simple as dismissing a notification would trigger sending a lot of unique device information to remote servers? It is worrying when you think about the fact that developers can do that on-demand.”
The iPhone Apps Harvesting Data Will Plague iPhone Ecosystem
Spokespersons for Meta and LinkedIn categorically denied the allegations. According to them, the platforms don’t use data for advertising or other inappropriate purposes. They say that the data is only used to guarantee notifications work properly. Both companies claim to follow all of Apple’s developer guidelines. It is pertinent to mention here that this isn’t the first time Mysk’s tests have discovered data problems at Apple. The silicon giant spent untold millions persuading the world that “what happens on your iPhone, stays on your iPhone.”
In October 2023, Mysk found that an iPhone feature signified to protect details about your WiFi address isn’t as private as the company promises. In 2022, the company was hit with multiple class action lawsuits after Mysk’s finding revealed that Apple collects data about its users even after they toggle the switch on an iPhone privacy setting.
In addition, the tests revealed that when you interact with a notification from Facebook, the app collects IP addresses, the number of milliseconds since your phone was restarted, the amount of free memory space on your phone, and a host of other details. A combination of this data is enough to identify a person with a high level of accuracy. LinkedIn, for instance, uses notifications to deduce which timezone you’re in, your display brightness, and what mobile carrier you’re using. According to Mysk, LinkedIn also collects a host of other information that appears specifically related to advertising campaigns.
All iPhone users know very well that Apple provides a unique advertising ID number that’s particularly made to facilitate data collection and targeted ads. However, there are settings such as “Ask App Not To Track” that control that ad ID. Theoretically, such settings are supposed to stop companies from harvesting information about you and your behavior from different apps and other parts of the internet. However, fingerprinting is an underhanded approach to keep doing it anyway. Mysk stated:
“They can intentionally send a notification to a targeted device just so that the app starts in the background and sends back details,”
Reports claim that Apple is working on some significant changes to the iPhone operating system’s rules. It could improve the situation, but it’s still not known whether it will solve the problem. Starting in Spring 2024, app developers will have to explain why and how they’re using certain “APIs”. These are pieces of software that apps use to intercommunication with each other and the iPhone operating system.
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