Apple users are allowed to stop sharing data

Cupertino / Berlin. Can an application track my online activities or not? In the future, users of an iPhone, iPad or Apple TV will be able to decide for themselves: Apple will be the first smartphone provider to offer its customers a simple way to stop tracking their behavior on different apps and websites. Apple celebrates new operating system success for data security. Online companies, such as Facebook and media companies that rely on online advertising, on the other hand, see the free internet as a risk.

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In the future, iPhone app providers will explicitly ask users for permission for comprehensive monitoring. Analyst App Annie estimates that 90 percent of users will drop. This has long-term consequences because unposted advertising is significantly less effective than ads that are tailored to the user’s personal interests.

Facebook has been warning for months that this will mainly affect small and medium-sized companies that rely on personalized ads on the online network, especially in corona infections. On Monday, several German associations in the advertising and media industry complained to the Federal Cartel Office that Apple was unfair competition.

Apple, on the other hand, insists: “We believe that privacy is a fundamental human right.” The data belongs to the users and they can determine how their data is used and by whom. ”The process has received support from the authorities and data protection authorities.

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Application providers can identify a user to customize the ad, and Apple devices have a unique identification number, the IDFA. In the future, application providers will need to explicitly ask users for permission to access this ID. Users can block all monitoring requests in the settings with one switch.

The associations criticize the panel as “actually excluding all competitors from processing commercially relevant data in the Apple ecosystem.” However, at the same time, Apple excludes its own services from planned changes and collects a significant amount of user data. dpa

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