Facebook Still ‘Secretly’ Tracks Your iPhone—This Is How To Stop It

So, this isn’t good. Your iPhone settings enable you to tell Facebook you don’t want your location tracked. It’s clear and non-ambiguous. Why then, if you tell Facebook “never” to access your location, is the data harvesting giant doing exactly that? Apple’s iOS 14.5 is just a few weeks old, and the data already suggests it has delivered the expected strike against Facebook . Unsurprisingly, more than 80% of users do not opt in to being tracked. Millions of you have seen through the brazen warnings that Facebook’s free apps won’t remain free unless we surrender our right to privacy. Facebook generates almost all its revenue from digital advertising—targeting ads by harvesting as much data from you and about you as it can. “Facebook marketing is generally dominated by iOS,” one ad industry article laments, “it’s pretty safe to assume Facebook has lost at least half their data, arguably the most valuable half.”All of which means that Facebook will be doing ever more with the data that remains. And there’s a hidden danger in all the iOS 14.5 publicity—a false sense of security for iPhone users, thinking that the Facebook data issue is suddenly over, that everything has now changed. That would be very wrong—it really hasn’t. Apple has clamped down on Facebook tracking you across third-party websites and apps, not harvesting your data on those it owns. Just like Google with Chrome, Photos and Gmail, Facebook apps compare miserably to their peers when it comes to helping themselves to your information. This isn't coincidence—it’s a philosophy at play.iOS 14.5 is also fairly new—the impact is still being assessed. And so we’ll need to wait and see what workarounds the data giants find to keep tracking our web and app activity. The last major privacy innovation was to restrict location tracking. And here we can see exactly how it’s the letter and not the spirit of the rules that seems to apply. Despite me telling my iPhone “never” to allow Facebook access to my location, despite me checking Facebook online to confirm it knows “location history for mobile devices” is set to “off.” Facebook continues to exploit a loophole, harvesting photo location tags and IP addresses, all of which it will, in its own words, “collect and process.”I took a photo with my iPhone and then uploaded that to my Facebook account. I used Facebook’s app on my iPhone, the same app that has been told “never” to access my location, the same account that knows I have this switched off. But Facebook still collects the location tag from that photo, along with my IP address. My iPhone adds GPS tags to photos—useful to sort and find images. I can use the share function in Apple Photos to strip location data as I send, and most messengers strip this data, but in Facebook’s app, when I upload a photo, the data is sent as well. Facebook and Instagram do in fact strip the metadata, the so-called EXIF information, from photos that are saved to their platforms.


All data is taken from the source: http://forbes.com
Article Link: https://www.forbes.com/sites/zakdoffman/2021/05/22/apple-user-warning-how-to-stop-facebook-secretly-tracking-your-iphone-ipad/


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