Apple, which has used four interfaces for the benefit of environmental protection, "talks about how much iPhone pays attention to user privacy", and the result is "I don't allow others to peep into user privacy, but I can".

On November 7, according to a research report of Mysk Software Company, Apple has been tracking users' privacy. Although Apple has always regarded protecting users' privacy as the highlight of the product, and has provided the iPhone Analytics ("Share iPhone Analytics" in China) switch in its settings, allowing users to decide whether to share their data to Apple servers.

But research shows that when you turn off the iPhone's shared data analysis, Apple will also use its own applications to collect extremely detailed information about users, which is obviously in direct contradiction with Apple's own description of how privacy protection works.

Specifically, Tommy Mysk and Talal Haj Bakry, two application developers and security researchers from the software company Mysk, studied two iPhones through software.

One of them is the jailbreak iPhone with iOS 14.6 system version, which is convenient for them to study. Because Apple has introduced application tracking transparency in iOS 14.5, prompting users to decide whether to provide their data to a single application, and asking whether to require applications not to track?

It's a sense of deja vu that Cook has developed an interface for you, but whether it is useful or not is up to him.

Through software analysis of data, two researchers found that no matter whether the "shared iPhone analysis" is enabled or not, the iPhone's own programs will continue to collect and send data, including App Store, Apple Music, Apple TV, books and stocks. They found that analysis control and other privacy settings had no significant impact on Apple's data collection - no matter whether iPhone Analytics is turned on or off, tracking will be carried out. Most applications that send analysis data share a consistent ID number, which will allow Apple to track your activities through its services.

Among them, the App Store collects information about everything users do in near real time, including what they click, which applications they search, which advertisements they see, and when users view applications and how they search. The application also sends detailed information about the user and the user's device, including ID number, phone type, screen resolution, keyboard language, how to connect to the Internet, especially the information type (fingers, facial posture) commonly used for unlocking. This also means that when you browse applications related to mental health, addiction and sexual orientation in the App Store, your data may be collected by Apple.

The stock application will send Apple a list of stocks that users have seen, the names of stocks that users have viewed or searched for, the time stamp when users perform this operation, and the records of any news articles that users have seen in the application. This information is sent to the URL marked for analysis, //stocks-analytics-events.apple.com/analyticseventsv2/async 。 This transmission is separate from the iCloud communication required to synchronize data across devices. However, unlike other applications, the stock application does not record too many device ID numbers and details.

In order to avoid the above discovery that information is constantly leaked due to prison break, the researchers checked another mobile phone with iOS 16 system version, but on iOS 16, they saw the same application sending similar packets to the same Apple website. This proves that cell phone information leakage is not caused by prison break. Only on iOS 16 phones, the encryption method of these information is more advanced.

Mysk said that these findings did not conform to standard industry practices. He and his research partners have conducted similar tests on the analysis of Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge in the past. In these two applications, when the shared analysis setting is turned off, data will not be sent privately.

Apple's practice of collecting and analyzing information is listed in its privacy policy, so its behavior is legal, but Mysk was surprised by such careful recording. He hoped that "as a large company, Apple should regard privacy as a basic human right, avoid collecting details and turn to collecting more general information."

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