Manzana has always prided itself on being a company focused on user privacy and protection, but according to an internal investigation, the tech giant may be going against its own practices when it comes to collecting data from the App Store.
As reported by the iOS developers themselves, users can be identified and associated with your own account iClouddespite the fact that Apple has reiterated the opposite.
This finding, of course, embarrasses Apple and unmasks the difference between the policy of privacy that any user can think and maintain that they are protected and the privacy policy that is actually being applied.
Well, in a series of tweets on Monday, according to the Mysk app research and development team, investigating Apple systems, discovered an ID in their analytics data referred to as a “DSID”. It was later determined that this refers to a “Directory Services Identifier”, which is linked to an iCloud account.
🚨 New Findings: 🧵 1/6Apple’s analytics data include an ID called “dsId”. We were able to verify that “dsId” is the “Directory Services Identifier”, an ID that uniquely identifies an iCloud account. Meaning, Apple’s analytics can personally identify you 👇 pic.twitter.com/3DSUFwX3nV
— Mysk 🇨🇦🇩🇪 (@mysk_co) November 21, 2022
Apple App Store analytics could identify users
Taking this into account and if that “DSID” is really linked to the user’s iCloud, Apple is able to link your name, email address and other credentials. The medium The Verge, upon hearing the news, quickly tried to contact Apple, but ultimately has not responded.
Of course, knowing this, Doubts arise as to whether Tim Cook’s company is in the business of selling data from users to third parties.
However, here it is blunt and states that its ad platform does not connect user or device data with data collected from third parties for targeted advertising, and that it does not share the user’s device or device ID with the collection companies of data.
Of course, despite this statement the question remains as to whether these data could be used for their own purposes, since there is evidence that it has the method of collecting data.
Despite all this, it still seems that there is something even worse and that is that the thread also points out that data continues to be sent even if device scanning is disabled in settingsand that Apple sends your DSID in other apps too.
In the last tweet of the thread, Mysk says: “There are only three things you need to know: 1- The App Store sends detailed analytics about you to Apple. 2- There is no way to prevent it. 3- The analytics data is directly linked to you.”