Apple has built a great deal of its public identity on privacy, and one feature in particular earned it: App Tracking Transparency, introduced in iOS 14.5, which forced apps to ask permission before tracking you across other apps and websites.
What most people do not realise is that the setting does not cover Apple. Apple runs an advertising business, it is governed by a different control, and that control is in a different menu.
The first switch: everyone else
Settings → Privacy & Security → Tracking → Allow Apps to Request to Track.
Turning this off does more than hide the prompts. Every app is automatically given a "do not track" answer without being asked, which means you cannot be worn down by repeated requests, and an app you install in two years is covered by a decision you made today.
This is the setting that reshaped the mobile advertising industry, and it works as advertised.
The second switch: Apple
Settings → Privacy & Security → Apple Advertising → Personalised Ads.
Apple sells advertising in the App Store, Apple News and Stocks. To target it, the company uses information about your activity across its own services. The App Tracking Transparency setting has no effect on this at all — a separate business, under a separate control, which is on by default.
Two things are worth being precise about, because this is where criticism of Apple often overshoots. Apple's targeting is built on data it already holds, not on following you across other companies' apps — which is a materially weaker form of tracking than the one it blocked. And turning the setting off does not remove the ads; it stops your data being used to choose them.
Whether a company that profits from one kind of advertising should be the one policing another kind is a fair question. But the common claim that the ATT change was purely self-serving does not survive contact with what the two settings actually do.
The third switch: analytics
Settings → Privacy & Security → Analytics & Improvements → Share iPhone Analytics.
Your phone collects crash reports and usage data and sends them to Apple. This is the least alarming of the three — the data is used for engineering rather than advertising, and is aggregated — but it is on by default and nothing breaks when it is off.
The same screen holds Share with App Developers, which passes your crash data to the makers of individual apps, and improvement settings for Siri and dictation.
Doing all three
- Settings → Privacy & Security → Tracking, switch off Allow Apps to Request to Track.
- Back up one level, scroll down to Apple Advertising, switch off Personalised Ads.
- Back up again, open Analytics & Improvements, switch off Share iPhone Analytics and Share with App Developers.
Three minutes, and nothing you use stops working. The reason to know all three rather than just the famous one is that they are owned by different parts of the same company, and only one of them was ever advertised to you.
Sources: Apple's own privacy documentation and iOS settings; Tom's Guide; Payette Forward; iGeeksBlog; and Prothom Alo's original report.
