Apple refuses the apps that bypass iOS 14 anti-tracking features to track users

Earlier, Apple had announced in advance that the iOS system would no longer enable tracking by default, which means that advertising networks must obtain user consent before they can be tracked.

But it seems that most developers don’t quite understand the matter of obtaining user consent, so the practice of developers and advertising networks is to use other data to track users privately.

And this kind of behavior violates the developer policy and privacy policy. For example, Apple has warned some Chinese developers that they must cancel tracking in time or they will be taken off the shelf on App Store.

Now Apple has implemented this requirement in iOS 14.5 beta. Any application that wants to track users must request user authorization IDFA or advertising identifier.

There are currently many applications that have tried to release new versions and have been rejected by Apple. The reason given by Apple is that developers privately collect information to try to track users.

The entire process does not require the user’s consent to authorize the identity identifier. This approach actually bypasses Apple’s privacy policy and will naturally be rejected.

Apple wrote in the review rejection reason: “Your app uses algorithmically converted device and usage data to create a unique identifier in order to track the user. The device information collected by your app may include some of the following: NSLocaleAlternateQuotationBeginDelimiterKey, NSTimeZone, NSLocaleGroupingSeparator, NSLocaleDecimalSeparator …”

However, some developers said that they did not use such tracking technologies. In that case, how did Apple determine that the developers violated the privacy policy?

In fact, these applications do use illegal tracking technology, but the developer is not clear, because this is a serious error in the ADJUST SDK used by the developer.

This development kit is actually an advertising component package, and this ad network has built a variety of strategies in the development kit to try to track users to be discovered by Apple.

Subsequently, the developer also received a notice from the ad network ADJUST, which admitted that it used certain tracking methods to generate unique identifiers for users for tracking purposes.

The collected data includes but is not limited to device model, CPU type, collected memory, charging status, battery power, etc., and then uses algorithms to generate identifiers.

In this way, users can be marked with identifiers to push personalized advertisements in conjunction with other collected data. Currently, ADJUST has updated the SDK to make corrections.

Now all affected developers need to download the new version of the development kit and resubmit the application for listing. This time they will not be rejected by Apple because of this issue.

Via: Forbes