How To Stop Apps on Your iPhone From Tracking You
This article will explain how you can stop Apps on your iPhone from tracking you.
With the introduction of iOS 14.5, iPhone users have the ability to stop Apps from tracking them. It works as follows: you install an app, you open it, and immediately it will ask you if you’d like to allow (app name) to track your activity. This basically means that it will track everything about you in order to provide customized experiences based on your activity to give you a better user experience.
When this occurs, your iPhone will usually display the phrase Please allow (the name of the app) to track your activity, with buttons that read “Ask App Not To Track” or “Allow”.
If you tap on “Ask App Not To Track“, the app you’ve just installed will not track any of your information whatsoever.
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How to stop apps from tracking you on your iPhone
Before you turn on the option to stop apps from tracking, you need to make sure to update your iPhone to iOS 14.5 or higher. After this, all your apps will start asking you whether you give permission to the app to track your information or not.
Assuming your iPhone is up-to-date, you can turn on the option to get notified every time an app is about to track your information. To do so, you should:
- Open Settings and scroll down to Privacy.
- Tap on Tracking.
- And finally, toggle the option “Allow Apps to Request to Track” on.
In most cases, this option is turned on by default by Apple. So most likely you don’t have to go through these steps. But, in case you were wondering, you can always make sure you’ve turned this option on or off by following the previous mentioned steps.
What to do if you’ve accidentally tapped “Allow”?
So you’ve installed and opened a new App and your iPhone immediately asked you whether you would like to allow that App to track your data or not. And by accident, you’ve tapped on Allow. Can you fix that?
The answer is Yes. To block an App from tracking you after you’ve allowed it you should go to Settings > Privacy > Tracking and scroll down to the second section, where all apps that have asked for permission to track your activity are displayed.
You can now toggle any App off or on. Toggling and App on means that you allow it to track your activity. Toggling it off means that you deny it to track your activity.
Toggling and App ON means that you allow it to track your activity. Toggling it OFF means that you deny it to track your activity.
Can you also turn the option to stop apps from tracking you off?
Not exactly. But what you can do is turn the option off to allow them to request to track you. This way, you will not be prompted every time you’ve downloaded a new App to ask your permission whether it should track your information or not. The App will track your information by default.
To turn this option off, you should
- Open your Settings.
- Scroll down to Privacy and tap on it.
- Tap on Tracking.
- Toggle the option “Allow Apps to Request to Track” off.
But be aware that after you’ve toggled this option off, you will not be asked whether a particular app should track your data or not. It will do it anyway.
Are Users Allowing apps to track their behavior on their iPhone?
So now you’ve read this article you might be asking yourself: do iPhone/iPad users allow apps to track their data or not?
As to be expected, the vast majority of iOS 14.5 users have opted not to allow apps to track them; in fact, only four percent of users have chosen to let their web activity be tracked by analytics.
A Flurry Analytics study found that, as of iOS 14.5, only four percent of iPhone users in the US agreed to ad tracking.
According to 2.5 million users, worldwide acceptance for ad tracking is around 11%.
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