How to use Apple App Tracking Transparency on iPhone. This setting prevents advertisers from following you online.

How to best use Apple’s App Tracking Transparency feature to stop apps on your iPhone from tracking you.

We’ve all had this more or less frightening experience: you spend a short time on a website selling shoes and end up with shoe ads appearing for weeks on every website you visit. The iPhone has a feature that can protect you from this behavior. This option disables ad tracking in the apps you use.

Apple’s app tracking transparency gives you more control over which apps can or can’t track you, and how they do it. Unless you explicitly give an app permission to track you (including the Apple app), it won’t be able to use your data to serve you targeted ads, share your location with advertisers, or share any other identifiers with third parties.

The change, first unveiled at the June 2020 WDC conference and rolled out alongside the iOS 14.5 update, was greeted with thunderous applause from privacy advocates and was equally criticized by companies like Facebook, for whom it was clearly going well.

The addition is part of Apple’s broader transparency and privacy initiative, which Apple CEO Tim Cook calls a “basic human right.”With the release of iOS 14.3, users began to see sensitivity labels informing which categories of data an app requests before downloading it from the App Store.

Here’s how to use the App Tracking Transparency feature to control which apps can track you.

How to turn off new app tracking

When you download and open a new app, you’ll get notifications asking if you want the app to track your activity on other companies’ apps and websites. You’ll also see information about what the app will track. You can click “Ask the app not to track my activities”to prevent this, or “Allow”.

You can also reverse your decision by going to Settings > Privacy > Tracking and turning off the “Allow tracking requests from apps”setting. This means that apps that try to ask for your permission will be automatically blocked and will know that you refused to ask them. And all apps (except those you’ve already given permission for) won’t be able to access your device information for ads.

It is important to note here that this does not mean that ads will disappear. You’ll just see more generic ads rather than the pairs of shoes you’ve been looking at recently.

How to turn off app tracking in already downloaded apps

For apps you’ve already downloaded that may have permission to follow you, of course, you can revoke those permissions or refine them on a per-app basis.

In settings, tap an app, then tap to disable tracking. Or go to Settings > Privacy > Tracking and tap to enable or disable each app in the list of apps that have requested the ability to track you.

All app developers now need your permission to track you. If Apple learns that a developer is tracking users who have asked not to be tracked, they will either have to update their app information or agree to be removed from the App Store.

Apple believes that such privacy features are important to its products. Tim Cook said all of this was put in place today because since the Cupertino company’s business model isn’t built around selling ads, the giant can focus on privacy.

Even so, it’s important to remember that when you ask apps not to track you, you’re simply preventing developers from accessing your Apple ID for Advertisers (IDFA) on iPhone. Developers use this IDFA to track you for the purpose of quoting advertisements. Denying IDFA access also doesn’t mean developers can’t track you in other ways.