Boost your privacy by preventing specific apps from tracking your activity or preventing all iPhone, iPad, and TV apps from asking to track you in the first place.
Apple’s App Tracking Transparency privacy feature requires iPhone, iPad, and Apple TV apps to obtain explicit consent from you before tracking you.
Apple argues that App Tracking Transparency is about giving people choice. Apps that want to track your activity across other apps and websites are required to put up a system permissions dialog, not dissimilar from those you see when an app seeks permission to get your current geographical location or access your Photos library.
According to Apple’s description of the feature:
Apple requires app developers to ask for permission before they track your activity across apps or websites they don’t own in order to target advertising to you, measure your actions due to advertising or to share your information with data brokers.
Before iOS 14.5 and iPadOS 14.5, apps were able to leverage your IDFA identifier to track your activity across apps and websites from different developers for more accurate ad targeting. Such unsolicited tracking was an invasion of user privacy, so Apple sought to do something about it.
For those wondering, IDFA, or the Identifier for Advertisers, is a unique randomly generated identifier assigned by Apple to a user’s device that advertisers use for tracking.
With the App Tracking Transparency initiative, developers can no longer resort to IDFA cross-app tracking without getting explicit user permission first. Any apps found to track users without consent will be removed from the App Store altogether, the Cupertino technology giant warns in a post on the Apple Developer website.
Stop an iPhone or iPad app from tracking you
The first time you open an app, you’ll be greeted with Apple’s privacy prompt seeking your permission to track you. From there, you can very easily choose to either not be tracked by this app or to permit tracking.
At any point in time, you can change that setting for that specific app by following these directions:
- Open Settings on your iPhone or iPad.
- Choose Privacy & Security.
- Select Tracking.
- Turn tracking on or off for an app displayed in the list of apps.
All apps aside from those that you have previously given permission to track will be blocked from accessing your device’s advertising identifier.
Important: Not all apps track you. So, if you open such an app for the first time, it won’t show the App Tracking Transparency popup.
What happens when you give tracking permission
Not all apps track your activity invasively for ad targeting; some do it to improve features like content recommendations. If you decide to permit an app to track you, doing so will allow information about you or your device collected through the app to be combined with information that third parties already have.
Combined data can then be used for purposes of target advertising or advertising measurement. If an app’s developer has opted to share that information with data brokers, any publicly available information about you or your device may be linked to your user profile.
It is not considered tracking when the app developer:
- Combines information about you or your device on your device without sending data off of your device in a way that identifies you.
- Shares information about you or your device with data brokers solely for the purpose of fraud detection/prevention or security purposes.
- When the data broker with which the app developer shares information about you or your device is a consumer reporting agency and the information is shared for purposes of reporting on your credit activity or to obtain information on your creditworthiness in order to determine your eligibility for credit.
If you’d rather not see those prompts at all, you can disable tracking altogether.
Stop all iOS apps from tracking you altogether
- Go to iPhone or iPad Settings > Privacy & Security > Tracking.
- Turn off Allow Apps to Request to Track.
- Choose Ask Apps to Stop Tracking and this will stop all apps installed on this device from tracking your activity across other companies’ apps and websites.
Furthermore, when you disable “Allow Apps to Request to Track,” new apps that you install on your device that attempt to ask for your permission to track you across other apps and websites will be blocked from asking and automatically informed that you have requested not to be tracked. In other words, toggling off this option will stop the operating system from seeking your permission and prevent apps from accessing your device’s IDFA advertising identifier.
Stop app tracking on Apple TV
You can stop selected or all TV apps from tracking you.
- Open Settings on your Apple TV and go to General > Privacy & Security.
- Select Tracking.
- Set individual apps under App Tracking to “Ask Not to Track.”
- If you want to turn off tracking altogether, turn off Allow Apps to Ask to Track from the top.
Why can’t I enable the “Allow Apps to Request to Track“ setting on my iPhone?
The “Allow Apps to Request to Track“ toggle may be grayed out in Settings on your device because of these reasons.
- Your Apple ID was created in the last three days.
- Your Apple ID is managed by an educational institution or uses a configuration profile that limits tracking.
- iPhone, iPad, or Apple TV is using a child Apple ID account, or the user age on that account is under 18 by birth year. An important thing to note is that child account age varies by country and region.
Don’t worry about being tracked while this setting is grayed out. Apple says that in any of the aforementioned cases, all apps that request to track you will be denied permission by default. And should the status of your Apple ID account or device change down the road, you will be allowed to toggle the setting “Allow Apps to Ask to Track” on or off at will.
To sum up, use a personal Apple ID account for adults that was created more than three days ago, and you should have no issues toggling “Allow Apps to Request to Track“ on or off.
Check out next: 10 ways to boost your privacy on iPhone and iPad