You assume that Apple is telling the truth. The cynic in me thinks that they narrowed the definition of tracking and follow in a legal sense but not in the way we would think of it. Or they are outright lying. It is also possible that it isn't apple doing it but a third party doing it on Apples behalf.
2cb|5 years ago
My first question would be... why? What's their motivation?
Facebook has to track users to make money, it's their entire business model.
The same is not true of Apple, who make almost all their profits from hardware sales and are worth over $2 trillion.
Going out of their way to get a third party to secretly spy on users on their behalf sounds like far more effort and risk than it's worth to me. It's not like they're desperate for extra cash.
And it's not like it'd be impossible to find out if it was indeed the case. iOS gets reverse engineered all the time. I can see all the traffic my iPhone sends through my DNS logs. If this hypothetical third party was embedded in iOS spying on user activity, it'd be spotted quite easily and quickly.
So I ask again, why would Apple do that? Aside from being a total PR nightmare it'd be straight up illegal.
I trust Apple because I don't see what reason they have to lie when they've built a multi-trillion dollar business without tracking their users already.
simonh|5 years ago
So it's a matter of making a call between using vendors we know for a fact are tracking you, some of which have lied about it (see, hard to keep these things secret), or one that at least claims not to and has a lot to lose if caught out.
giantrobot|5 years ago
It seems unlikely Apple is going to outright lie about something like that considering it could open them up to serious legal liability (CCPA, GDPR, etc).