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Apple's 'Do Not Track' Button Is Privacy Theater:
Earlier this year Apple received ample coverage about how the company was making privacy easier for its customers by introducing a new, simple, tracking opt-out button for users as part of an iOS 14.5 update. Early press reports heavily hyped the concept, which purportedly gave consumers control of which apps were able to collect and monetize user data or track user behavior across the internet. Advertisers (most notably Facebook) cried like a disappointed toddler at Christmas, given the obvious fact that giving users more control over data collection and monetization, means less money for them.
By September researchers had begun to notice that Apple's opt-out system was somewhat performative anyway. The underlying system only really blocked app makers from accessing one bit of data: your phone's ID for Advertisers, or IDFA. There were numerous ways for app makers to track users anyway, so they quickly got to work doing exactly that, collecting information on everything from your IP address and battery charge and volume levels, to remaining device storage, metrics that can be helpful in building personalized profiles of each and every Apple user.
[...] Here's the thing. There's been just an absolute torrent of studies showing how "anonymizing" data is a gibberish term. It only takes a few additional snippets of data to identify "anonymized" users, yet the term is still thrown around by companies as a sort of "get out of jail free" card when it comes to not respecting user privacy. There's an absolute ocean of data floating around the data broker space that comes from apps, OS makers, hardware vendors, and telecoms, and "anonymizing" data doesn't really stop any of them from building detailed profiles on you.
Apple's opt-out button is largely decorative, helping the company brand itself as hyper privacy conscious without actually doing the heavy lifting required of such a shift [...]
In other words, it's B.A.D. (Broken As Designed).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 14 2021, @09:43PM
1st party can do it though security permissions. An app nor website shouldn't be able to get battery levels unless the user allowed it to. Nor should an app fail to function without that data. And the user should be able to pipe in different battery level stats from a different source.
Remember Zone Alarm? That hugely annoying yet awesome Windows firewall? Absolutely every network connection attempt from anything was flagged by Zone Alarm and you could control what happened. That type of quality software and granularity needs to come back.
Sadly you can't trust any of the main providers. They all abuse their positions to push their own products and views. An Apple example is how they handle Bluetooth. The off button is only a short-term, limited to your current location off button. The real off switch is buried in their badly categorized settings. Plus every software update turns Bluetooth back on so they can scan your surrounding area and update their wireless maps. I've noticed Siri being harder to keep off as well.
Keep in mind most of those cookie notifications are still illegal anyway. The governments don't really care or are too busy or too underfunded to care. Something about how they default to all on, it takes far more clicks to turn things off then to accept everything, and they interfere with how you use the site. There was a Slashdot article about it. It's similar to how Obama Care would have maintained people's current plan prices but insurers decided to drop the plans and make new ones so they could charge more without raising existing prices. Technically rights protectors try but in practice they always fail.