It seems confusing to say “Apple users aren’t affected by this” and immediately follow it up with “…and you can disable your Apple tracking ID”, isn’t it? It implies T-Mobile is tracking you through the ID.
I’m probably overthinking this, and the article is just written a bit poorly.
Not like the T-Mobile user agreement is much more specific… Like all privacy policies, it makes you guess where things are collected
Yeah they skipped past some likely questions. I can try to fill in a little.
Apple users are assigned an advertising ID, but the user can reset (not disable IIRC) the ID whenever they want, so it might not be as useful to the carrier for profiling purposes. All that would give them is fragments of profiles that, without other identifiers like phone or email, might be impossible to associate with their customer.
Android users tend to have numerous and more persistent identifiers available for profiling, and manufacturers have been permissive with carrier partners re: daemons, kernel extensions, and custom telecom apps. I think that’s what the article meant was unique to Android. Carrier tracking can just be more deeply embedded in these systems, beyond the obvious bloatware apps and widgets.
Interestingly, Apple sells similar tracking functionality for custom provisioned commercial devices IIRC, complete with the uninstallable apps, enhanced telemetry, etc. So it’s not like they can’t or won’t track users as a paid service, they just have no reason to let carriers do it on their equipment.
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It seems confusing to say “Apple users aren’t affected by this” and immediately follow it up with “…and you can disable your Apple tracking ID”, isn’t it? It implies T-Mobile is tracking you through the ID.
I’m probably overthinking this, and the article is just written a bit poorly.
Not like the T-Mobile user agreement is much more specific… Like all privacy policies, it makes you guess where things are collected
Yeah they skipped past some likely questions. I can try to fill in a little.
Apple users are assigned an advertising ID, but the user can reset (not disable IIRC) the ID whenever they want, so it might not be as useful to the carrier for profiling purposes. All that would give them is fragments of profiles that, without other identifiers like phone or email, might be impossible to associate with their customer.
Android users tend to have numerous and more persistent identifiers available for profiling, and manufacturers have been permissive with carrier partners re: daemons, kernel extensions, and custom telecom apps. I think that’s what the article meant was unique to Android. Carrier tracking can just be more deeply embedded in these systems, beyond the obvious bloatware apps and widgets.
Interestingly, Apple sells similar tracking functionality for custom provisioned commercial devices IIRC, complete with the uninstallable apps, enhanced telemetry, etc. So it’s not like they can’t or won’t track users as a paid service, they just have no reason to let carriers do it on their equipment.