How to Disable Ad Tracking on iPhone
About Ad Tracking on Your iPhone
Apple prides itself on protecting its users privacy, but it still collects some data about how you use your iPhone. even though Apple uses this data to show you some targeted ads, it does not share anything with third parties and it keeps your data anonymous by taking away any personal identifiers.
After analyzing your data, Apple keeps you in a group with at least 5,000 people with similar interest. Apple then sends the same targeted ads to everyone in that particular group. Third-party advertisers, such as Criteo services, can work with Apple to target their tracked ads at a particular group of users.
The data that Apple collects is made up of informations about your device, your location, your search history, your, and installed applications. You can reduce the data that Apple collects by turning off certain features on your iPhone, but you do not need to if all you want is to stop the targeted ads.
How to Switch Off Ad Tracking on Your iPhone
After turning off ad tracking on your iPhone, you will still see the same number of ads as you saw earlier. Instead, you will now be seing more generic ads instead of the targeted ones. The settings below would affect the ads you see in the App Store, Apple News, and Stocks application.
Disabling ad tracking on your iPhone would also stop other advertising services such as Criteo from making use of apple data to target you. Apple does this by replacing your unique identifier with all zeros. That way, it is impossible to differentiate your data from anyone else with ad tracking turned off.
To disable ad tracking in iOS, use each of the settings listed below.
Limit Ad Tracking
To disable ad tracking on your iPhone, open up the Settings application and tap on the Privacy option. At the bottom of the paprivacy page, go to Advertising, then turn on the Limit Ad Tracking option there.
Limit Location-Based Ads
Apple might still still use your iPhone’s location data to target you with ads that are based on location-based. You can turn off this feature from the Location Services settings.
Open the Settings application and tap on the Privacy option. Go to the Location Services, then scroll down and open up the System Services. Turn off the option for Location-Based Apple Ads there.
Reset Advertising Identifier
You might also want to reset your advertising identifier in addition to turning off ad tracking. This does not delete the data that Apple collected about you, but it would make sure that no one can link that data to you again.
Open up the Settings application and go to Privacy > Advertising. Then tap on the Reset Advertising Identifier button and confirm that you want to Reset the Identifier.
Turn Off Background App Refresh
Background App Refresh permits applications to keep running even when you are not using them. This is very useful for some application, as it allows them to back up some data or receive new messages. But some other applications take advantage of this access to track your data and send them to advertising networks.
Open up the Settings application and go over to General > Background App Refresh. Turn it off completely or use the toggles to turn it off for specific applications.
