A surprising lawsuit was filed against Apple, which has made a name for itself with the importance it attaches to privacy. Two security experts revealed that the company is tracking its users and sending their actions to the company. So what data was collected? Here are the details…
Apple is violating privacy by monitoring its users
Apple has focused on user privacy with its efforts over the past few years. The company even disagreed with big tech companies like Meta on this issue. Meta, which opposes Apple’s idea of privacy, has lost billions of dollars in the process.
Tommy Mysk and Talal Haj Bakry, application developers and security experts, revealed that iOS records every touch made by users through their own applications and sends them to Apple. The surprising part of the research was that they disabled the sharing of device analytics in the iOS settings.
Mysk and Bakry say the data Apple collects is pretty detailed. For example, what you’re looking for in the App Store, the stocks you’ve researched and analyzed in the Stock Market app, the articles you’ve read, and your keyboard language are just a few of them.
Realizing that the data was being collected, the developers used an iPhone jailbroken with iOS 14.6 for testing. Experimenting the same test on iOS 16 and an unjailbroken iPhone, the team achieved similar results to previous research. Mysk was unable to detect what data was sent due to the encryption used in the latest operating system.
A class action lawsuit was filed against Apple, which was revealed to have collected the data, citing that it violated the California Consumer Privacy Act. The team cited deception that the company did not collect the data, but that it provided the user with freedom of privacy.
StockApps unveils the most privacy-conscious firm
Giant companies use their users’ data with or without approval. So much so that companies follow almost every movement of their users and store many types of data. StockApps conducted a research on how companies follow a path about privacy.
According to the research, Apple only examines 12 different data and acts consciously about privacy. According to the statement made in StockApps, the company only stores the information necessary to maintain users’ accounts. The reason for this is that websites are not as dependent on advertising revenues as others.
So what do you think about Apple’s alleged privacy violation? Don’t forget to share your thoughts with us in the comments section!