Enhance your privacy and keep ad trackers out of your way with the app tracking transparency feature on your iPhone. Heres how to do it.
We’ve all had the scary experience where a brief moment of online shoe shopping turns into weeks of being followed up with ads for the same shoes on every website you visit. But there is a feature on your iPhone, starting with the iOS 14.5 update, that can help you boost your privacy online by giving you the option to disable ad tracking within the apps you use. (For more information, check out all the new features in the latest iOS 15.)
Apple’s App Tracking Transparency feature gives you more control over which apps can track you on your iPhone, and how. Unless you explicitly give the app permission to track you (including those made by Apple), it cannot use your data for targeted advertising, share your location data with advertisers, or share your advertising ID or any other identifiers with third parties. The change – which was first revealed at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference in June 2020 – has garnered support from privacy advocates and criticism from companies like Facebook, which have said it would hurt their advertising business.
The move came alongside other efforts by Apple to increase transparency and privacy, which CEO Tim Cook called a “fundamental human right.” With the release of iOS 14.3, users started seeing “feed labels” for the app to let them know what categories of data the app requests before downloading it from the App Store.
Here’s how to use the new App Tracking Transparency feature to control which apps can track you.