Just last week, allegations that Apple still collects people’s data even when turning off their iPhone’s analytics settings appeared.
It now looks like the company is getting attention for a negative reason once again after researchers shared that it’s possible personalized IDs get sent to Apple as well.
Apparently, such data might include rather sensitive, personal information including users’ full names, birthdays and the emails linked to their iCloud accounts.
The research group that made this information public is known as Mysk and it seems like they have dug a little deeper into Apple’s analytics codes that allegedly get collected regardless of a user choosing not to share their data in the phone’s settings.
Mysk claims that a certain DSID or Directory Services Identifier is directly linked to the users’ iCloud accounts.
With that being said, they also pointed out that this DSID is associated with all the data stored in one’s iCloud such as their email address, name, and other personal information.
Naturally, in this case, Mysk could not help but call out Apple over the privacy policy they presented to their users in the beginning, questioning how little it’s actually rooted in reality.
Sure enough, as you may be aware, Apple’s Device Analytics and Privacy policy states, in the very first paragraph, that “None of the collected information identifies you personally.”
Furthermore, Mysk also confirms that the previous analytics data reports in the App Store and which get collected by the massive company, contain DSID.
What this means is that users’ activities and behaviors were collected and sent to their servers but also that they could personalize each and every report as well.
The same practice is quite common not just for the App Store but for other official Apple apps as well.
Given the fact that the company portrays itself as taking the protection of their users’ privacy very seriously, the new findings that seem to suggest otherwise have gotten Apple in hot water.
It has to be mentioned that Apple has begun to change some of their personal data tracking policies after deciding to include ads to the ecosystems of the iOS 16 and iPadOS.