Soon after we published our findings about the App Store collecting exhaustive and identifiable usage data, we were approached by law enforcement in the U.S. to help them navigate through the usage data they obtained from Apple for a suspect. They presented a court order to Apple. As we showed, there’s no way to turn off sharing the App Store usage data with Apple. As every iPhone or iPad user must use the App Store to install apps, Apple maintains this identifiable data about every user.
The data includes many aspects about how you explore apps, such as search history and every action you perform in the App Store app.
btw, he helped them for free and asked for their permission to write about it.
hold on, so the police reached out to you and asked you to help them parse the data?
were you compensated in any way?
Yes, we helped. No compensation. However, we asked for allowing us to address it publicly at some point. This is why we were able to share the experience and raise awareness.
