Apple has talked a lot about its commitment to user privacy, in part to differentiate itself from Amazon, Google, Facebook and other companies that offer different levels of competition. But in general, Apple tries to access a minimum of information about you and at least your personal information.
A friend’s question encouraged me to see which apps and services Apple uses for direct tracking and uses for recommendations and advertising, and which don’t.
In some cases, Apple does not interact with the data at all: sometimes it only offers device-based results and never accesses the data through its services or centrally; in others, it openly admits what it uses and perhaps gives you the option to turn it off.
Apple often uses end-to-end encryption (E2EE) for highly private data. The E2EE uses encrypted keys that are stored on each of your devices and to which Apple does not have access. When iOS, iPadOS, and macOS sync information between devices using E2EE, Apple can’t decrypt that information, and you can’t access it through iCloud.com either.
Next, we go over the top apps and services you need to know about, how it uses the data collected, and what Apple is doing to protect your privacy.
Apple digital stores
What you do in the App Store, Books, and other Apple digital stores affects how Apple “personalizes” ads and makes recommendations for related products.
On iOS, you can turn off personalized ads by going to Settings> Privacy> Apple Advertising> Personalized Ads. You can turn off recommendations by going to Settings> [Nombre de cuenta] > Content and purchases> Personalized recommendations.
Confidence score in a purchase
Apple tracks how you use your devices, including “the approximate number of phone calls or emails you send and receive,” which will be used to assess whether a purchase is legitimate to prevent fraud.
However, this score is calculated on your device. Apple cannot know what were the factors that determined it and deletes the data after a short time.
Apple Pay
Apple doesn’t track your transactions and creates a unique payment code for each purchase with the merchant. It displays your transactions with the Apple card, which it manages in conjunction with the bank with which you have the card.
Health
Health data is stored on your device and is encrypted. Although you can make a copy (safely), you cannot sync health data between all of your devices.
Plans
You may have noticed that Maps remembers where you parked your car. Do you share it with Apple? No. All of this is generated only on your device.
messages
Apple does not have access to the content of your messages because it uses E2EE to send and receive messages from other people and to sync them between all of your devices.
New
Apple doesn’t keep track of what you read. Use an anonymous identifier not associated with your Apple ID to record your reading habits and preferences (when you have marked that you want to read more or less articles like the one you are reading) and thus offer you more articles according to your centers of interest.
People in Photos app
Identifying people by name in photos is done on the device itself, and these associations are only synced through E2EE. Apple does not have access to names or faces.
Important places
Your iPhone or iPad keeps track of the places you visit that it considers “important” according to an algorithm that Apple does not disclose. You can see these “Important Places” by going to Settings> Privacy> Location Services> System Features> Important Places.
This data is used to show you personalized information about your device, such as predicting the traffic you will encounter, alerting you if there are AirTags nearby when you are in one of these locations, or offering souvenirs in photos.
Apple only stores this information on your device and uses E2EE when it syncs.
Siri
Siri voice recognition works anonymously using a random ID, and not everything you have on your device that concerns you is centrally sent to Apple.
Apple has been widely criticized for allowing outside workers to review Siri messages to improve service without notifying their users or without them being able to exit. I change it.
Original article published in igamesnews US.
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