Some of the companies involved said these findings are inaccurate.
It is worrying when you think about the fact that developers can do that on-demand.
These particular apps arent unusual bad actors.
Photo: Tada Images / Shutterstock.com (Shutterstock)
According to the researchers, its a widespread problem plaguing the iPhone ecosystem.
However, spokespeople for Meta and LinkedIn categorically denied the data is used for advertising or other inappropriate purposes.
Apple, TikTok, and X/Twitter didnt immediately answer Gizmodos questions for this article.
Fingerprinting circumvents privacy protections to track people and send them targeted adsand Apple explicitly forbids companies from doing it.
Combining data like these is enough to identify a person with a high level of accuracy.
The other apps in the test collected similar information.
The spokesperson said the data is never shared externally.
Meta, which owns Facebook, shared a similar statement.
The findings arent accurate.
This is consistent with our policies.
If companies cant identify you, they cant target you with ads.
But fingerprinting is a sneaky way to keep doing it anyway.
However, it seems notifications provide a backdoor.
Apple provides special softwareto help your apps send notifications.
The data harvesting Mysk spotted happened during this brief window.
Its mind-blowing, he said.
However, Mysk said there are a few reasons to think thats not why apps are collecting this data.
Beyond that, other data-hungry companies are sending notifications without feasting on all of this other information.
There are a few potentially innocent explanations for the notifications data problem.
For example, developers sometimes leave old code in their apps that performs functions that companies dont need anymore.
The researchers, however, said thats hard to believe.
The bad news is that it is unclear how Apple is going to enforce it, Mysk said.
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