Some iOS apps are using Background App Refresh to send data to tracking companies

“It’s 3 a.m. Do you know what your iPhone is doing?” Geoffrey A. Fowler reports for The Washington Post. “Mine has been alarmingly busy. Even though the screen is off and I’m snoring, apps are beaming out lots of information about me to companies I’ve never heard of. Your iPhone probably is doing the same — and Apple could be doing more to stop it.”
“On a recent Monday night, a dozen marketing companies, research firms and other personal data guzzlers got reports from my iPhone. At 11:43 p.m., a company called Amplitude learned my phone number, email and exact location. At 3:58 a.m., another called Appboy got a digital fingerprint of my phone. At 6:25 a.m., a tracker called Demdex received a way to identify my phone and sent back a list of other trackers to pair up with,” Fowler reports. “And all night long, there was some startling behavior by a household name: Yelp. It was receiving a message that included my IP address -— once every five minutes.”
“iPhone apps I discovered tracking me by passing information to third parties — just while I was asleep — include Microsoft OneDrive, Intuit’s Mint, Nike, Spotify, The Washington Post and IBM’s the Weather Channel. One app, the crime-alert service Citizen, shared personally identifiable information in violation of its published privacy policy,” Fowler reports. “According to privacy firm Disconnect, which helped test my iPhone, those unwanted trackers would have spewed out 1.5 gigabytes of data over the span of a month. That’s half of an entire basic wireless service plan from AT&T.”
“Yes, trackers are a problem on phones running Google’s Android, too,” Fowler reports. “Google won’t even let Disconnect’s tracker-protection software into its Play Store.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: See, Android dominates in market share, with roughly 75% to iOS’ 25%, and the media will never fail to remind us all of that whenever they can (as if it’s some accomplishment to have amassed the cheapskates and the poor of the world instead of cornering the market on those with disposable income and the proven will to spend it), but then they treat Android as an afterthought whenever there’s a problem. Whenever an issue is found, the media place “Apple” and “iPhone” in the headline and spend paragraphs on it upfront before noting down below, “Oh, yeah, Android has the same issue and it’s worse, too.” The double standard is blatant.
Anyway, Fowler recommends trying Disconnect‘s free iOS version of an app called Privacy Pro “to glimpse the secret life of your iPhone.”
If you want to stop this data communication on an iOS device, simply turn off Background App Refresh:
Go to Settings > General > Background App Refresh and turn them all off at once with the main toggle switch or, more granularly, turn off individual apps you do not want the refresh in the background with their respective toggles.