Apple Rejecting Apps With Fingerprinting Enabled As iOS 14 Privacy Enforcement Starts - Forbes

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A logo of the Apple company is pictured in Berlin, Germany, Wednesday, Jan. 4, 2017. (AP ... [+] Photo/Michael Sohn)

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Apple is rejecting updates to apps that conflict with its new privacy policies in iOS 14, signaling that it is now getting serious about privacy enforcement. And, likely, that iOS 14.5 is close to being released, since that’s the version of iOS 14 in which Apple will require apps that want to track users to display the App Tracking Transparency prompt and get user permission.

“Our app just got rejected by Apple’s app reviewer, blaming the MMP SDK for building a fingerprint ID,” says Aude Boscher, a growth marketing product manager at Heetch, a French transportation startup, in an industry Slack channel. “I saw other people complaining ... so it might soon come up for you as well!”

And no, it’s not Apple’s way of making an April Fool’s joke.

“Apple does not joke with privacy for anyone going against the rules,” says mobile marketing professional Claire Rozain. “Security matters!”

Apps that have been rejected so far include:

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• And potentially up to 50,000 additional apps (see below for details)

“Your app uses algorithmically converted device and usage data to create a unique identifier in order to track the user,” says the message that Apple is using to inform app developers that their update has been rejected. “The device information collected by your app may include some of the following: NSLocaleAlternateQuotationBeginDelimiterKey, NSTimeZone, NSLocaleGroupingSeparator, NSLocaleDecimalSeparator ...”

Screenshot of the rejection message Apple is sending to some app developers.

John Koetsier

According to mobile marketing analyst Eric Seufert, a software development kit from Adjust, a mobile measurement company, is causing the problem. If so, it could impact thousands of apps.

Adjust says that it is trusted by “over 50,000 apps” on its website, and according to AppFigures, 18% of the apps on the App Store and 11% of the apps on Google Play that use attribution providers use Adjust. (Full disclosure, I do some consulting for Singular, another mobile measurement partner.)

Device fingerprinting, sometimes called probabilistic attribution, uses a large amount of data about a device to identify it. A measurement company might, for instance, collect data on software version, time since last system update, time since last restart, location, time zone, and more: even things like battery status, charging level, and amount of disk space.

Put it all together and you have something fairly unique — estimates on degree of uniqueness vary — that you can use to track who clicked an ad, who installed an app, and potentially more. You could also use this data to potentially build a device graph which includes insights and history on every device your software interacts with.

All of that is explicitly forbidden by Apple in iOS 14, where if you want to track people and devices you need to explicitly ask for and get permission — not unlike GDPR in some ways. Before iOS 14, Apple’s IDFA (Identifier for Advertisers) was freely available without consent, and became the basis for measuring marketing and — frankly — tracking both devices and people.

The change could reduce ad networks’ revenue by billions.

Adjust has updated its SDK, which is open source and publicly available on GitHub, in the last 14 hours. The update takes out code which accesses data like CPU type, how much memory a phone has, its charging status and battery level, and more. In all, the recent update involves 36 changed files with 44 additions and 622 deletions, according to GitHub.

Theoretically, therefore, updating to the new Adjust SDK will render app updates possible for all Adjust customers.

I have reached out to both Apple and Adjust for comment.

It’s important to note that while currently customers of one mobile measurement platform are at risk of having their app updates rejected, that doesn’t mean all the others are safe. Apple is clearly taking its policies seriously and will likely have checked or be checking all measurement and analytics providers’ SDK to ensure they are complying with Apple’s policies.

While all the change associated with iOS 14 is disruptive to the industry, there is a big upside, says Rozain: a party that this benefits.

“Good for the user!”

The Link Lonk


April 02, 2021 at 01:45AM
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Apple Rejecting Apps With Fingerprinting Enabled As iOS 14 Privacy Enforcement Starts - Forbes

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