To Be Tracked or Not? Apple Is Now Giving Us the Choice.

A big motivator, of course, was that the privacy setting could hurt Facebook’s own business. If we choose not to let Facebook track us, it will be harder for the company to see what we are shopping for or doing inside other apps, which will make it more difficult for brands to target us with ads.(Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, has disputed that his company’s business will be hurt by Apple’s policy.)

“This is a huge step in the right direction, if only because it’s making Facebook sweat,” said Gennie Gebhart, a director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights nonprofit.

But, she added, “One big question is, will it work?”

Ms. Gebhart and other privacy experts said Apple’s new feature might not be enough to put an end to shady tracking on iPhones. It could simply push developers and ad-technology firms to find loopholes so they can continue tracking people in different ways, she and others said.

For about two months, I have been testing early versions of iOS 14.5 to get acclimated with the new privacy control and other new features. Only a few developers have been testing the pop-up window with the public, so my findings about how well the privacy feature works have been limited.

But I found that iOS 14.5 also has other important new features. One is the ability to use Siri to work with a music player other than Apple Music, such as Spotify. That’s a big deal: In the past, you could only ask Siri to play songs through Apple Music, so the voice assistant wasn’t as useful for those who preferred other music services.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/26/technology/personaltech/apple-app-tracking-transparency.html