9to5mac by Ben Lovejoy May 28th 2019
Monitoring software used by The Washington Post on an ordinary iPhone found that no fewer than 5,400 app trackers were sending data from the phone – in some cases including sensitive data like location and phone number.
It’s 3 a.m. Do you know what your iPhone is doing?
Mine has been alarmingly busy. Even though the screen is off and I’m snoring, apps are beaming out lots of information about me to companies I’ve never heard of. Your iPhone probably is doing the same — and Apple could be doing more to stop it.
On a recent Monday night, a dozen marketing companies, research firms and other personal data guzzlers got reports from my iPhone. At 11:43 p.m., a company called Amplitude learned my phone number, email and exact location. At 3:58 a.m., another called Appboy got a digital fingerprint of my phone. At 6:25 a.m., a tracker called Demdex received a way to identify my phone and sent back a list of other trackers to pair up with […]
In a single week, I encountered over 5,400 trackers, mostly in apps, not including the incessant Yelp traffic. According to privacy firm Disconnect, which helped test my iPhone, those unwanted trackers would have spewed out 1.5 gigabytes of data over the span of a month. That’s half of an entire basic wireless service plan from AT&T.
The report does need to be viewed in context, however.
App trackers in context
First, while there is much breathless reporting of data being sent to companies like Google and Facebook, the vast majority of it is innocuous. It’s simply developers using app analytics services provided by these companies, and they are learning things like which app features people do and don’t use.
More:
https://9to5mac.com/2019/05/28/app-trackers/
