Research suggests Apple collects data about iPhone usage even when the iPhone Analytics setting to “disable the sharing of Device Analytics altogether” is off
For all of Apple's talk about how private your iPhone is, the company vacuums up a lot of data about you. iPhones …
Context & Ripple Effects
This finding lands in a long-running gap between Apple's privacy marketing and its telemetry behavior. Researchers previously documented that iOS apps kept sending identifying data to third parties despite ATT opt-outs, and a cross-platform study found both Android and iOS transmit telemetry when idle or opted out — with Google collecting 20x more from Android than Apple from iOS.
What's new here is that the off switch itself appears not to work: usage data flows even with Device Analytics sharing disabled. Days later, researchers reported Apple's analytics payloads include a unique ID tied to a user's iCloud account, directly contradicting Apple's claim that this data contains no personally identifiable information.
First-order effects
- Users who explicitly disabled Device Analytics sharing are still having iPhone usage data collected by Apple, meaning the setting does not deliver the control it advertises.
- Apple's privacy positioning — built on contrasts like the 2016 differential privacy pitch — takes a credibility hit, since its own first-party collection now shows the same toggle-doesn't-stop-collection pattern it has criticized elsewhere.
Second-order effects
- The iCloud-ID finding gives plaintiffs and regulators a concrete artifact to test Apple's no-PII representation against, raising litigation and inquiry risk around how Apple describes its analytics pipeline.
- Rivals' telemetry practices come back into frame: any scrutiny of Apple reopens the comparison with Google's far heavier Android collection, pressuring both platforms on what opt-out settings actually do.
Third-order effects
- If device makers keep shipping controls that don't stop collection — echoing the iPhone 11 Pro case where location data leaked via ultra wideband until Apple shipped a new toggle — consent switches become a regulatory target, pushing toward independently verified telemetry disclosures rather than self-attested settings.
The trend: Mobile platform privacy is moving from marketing claims toward verifiable telemetry disclosure, as researchers repeatedly show that opt-out toggles fail to stop first-party data collection.