After the recent fiasco about Path application on iOS which used to upload the whole contact list on the device onto their private server Apple began to tighten iOS security even further. One of the enforcements is to ban any application from app store which implements user-tracking which made it increasingly difficult for ad networks to display contextual and personalized ads. But now these ad networks came up with a new workaround.
There are lots of privacy concerns arising from the consumers end and from the U.S government as well. After the social networking application Path came under the scanner The Congress sent two letters to Apple CEO Tim Cook requesting a brief on the security measures they were implementing to avoid similar consequences.
Till date each device has been tracked using it’s unique ID called UDID, but to step up the security Apple banned usage of UDID in third party applications. Since then the ad networks are sustaining using OpenUDID, ODID and MAC address of devices to avoid Apple’s security measures.
But they recently came up with a loop hole exploiting the geo-tagging feature of photos on iOS. The ad agencies are reportedly taking pictures in background which contain geo-location information tagged to them and uploading these pictures on to their server which grant access to user location data without the user’s consent. This is a potential breach of privacy, we are expecting a fix for this from Apple pretty soon. Stay tuned for more updates.