“What happens on your iPhone stays on your iPhone.” The message was printed 14 stories high, in simple black and white, on the side of a building at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. The proclamation was quintessential Apple: a bold spectacle, a well-timed verbal play, and a calculated jab at Google, Amazon, and every other competitor about to show off its latest products on the world’s biggest stage. It was also misleading. Apple, after all, practically laid the groundwork for the surveillance economy with its powerful App Store.
Through a certain lens, the iPhone is one of the most secure devices in the world. Its contents are encrypted by default. Any data that Apple collects through services such as Maps is assigned to random identifiers (rather than being tied to users’ IDs) that are periodically reset. Unlike Google’s Chrome browser, Apple’s Safari doesn’t track users across the web, which means the company could be leaving billions of dollars in revenue on the table by not harvesting users’ data.
But that doesn’t stop the 2 million or so apps in the App Store from spying on iPhone users and selling details of their private lives. It’s not just Facebook and Google that are using their iOS apps to hoover up your personal information for the benefit of marketers or back-alley data brokers. Beneath the App Store lies a flourishing ecosystem of businesses devoted to collecting, analyzing, and profiting from user data.
“Tens of millions of people have data taken from them—and they don’t have the slightest clue,” says Will Strafach, founder of the San Francisco–based cybersecurity firm Guardian. His company released a report last fall that identified 24 popular iOS apps—including the image-hosting service Photobucket and real estate portal Homes.com—that contained code from data-monetization firms, which can collect location information as often as every 15 seconds, even when an app is closed. Guardian has spotted similar code in hundreds of other iOS apps.
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