Can apps really track you after they’re deleted?
Yes and no, as Uber’s alleged practices stir online debate
LOS ANGELES Can a deleted app keep on tracking you, even if the app is off the phone?
The unsatisfying answer: Yes and no.
The app can’t follow you around and know your whereabouts. But app developers can engage in “tagging,” leaving behind a unique ID on an iPhone, the apps that were on it and the last Wi-Fi network the phone was logged onto to prove that the phone belonged to you, says Joseph Jerome, Privacy & Data Policy Counsel for the Center for Democracy and Technology.
The subject became hotly debated online this week in response to a New York Times profile of ride-hailing app Uber.
Uber had marked iPhones with persistent digital ID tags that would remain after users had deleted the Uber app and wiped the phone, the
Times said. Apple CEO Tim Cook scolded Uber CEO Travis Kalanick for the practice but didn’t kick Uber out of the App Store.
Today, Uber says it doesn’t track users or their location once they’ve deleted the app, but it does hold onto tagging data collected as a check against “fraudsters from loading Uber onto a stolen phone, putting in a stolen credit card, taking an expensive ride and then wiping the phone— over and over again,” the company told USA TODAY in a statement.
Blogger John Gruber, whose Daring Fireball is targeted to app developers, noted that Apple ditched earlier iPhone tools such as UDID (Unique Device ID) and Mac addresses for developers several years back (in 2012) because they were “being abused by privacy invasive ad trackers, analytics packages” and companies such as Uber.
Uber notes that Apple does allow limited use of fingerprinting and “merely stipulates which identifiers can be collected from the device, which are used by our team in combination with nondevice signals to detect fraudulent activity & suspicious logins.”
If app developers could truly track you after you’ve deleted the app, it would “violate apple developer terms and show a giant security hole” in the IOS operating system, Jerome says.