• Apple does actually build quite a few privacy preserving technologies into its operating system. The only unique identifier they intend to provide is the ID that the “we want to stalk you” prompts are referring to.

    Tracking companies have proven to find new ways to track users, unfortunately, but they are trying their very best. Something you can’t say of Microsoft or Google.

    As far as Apple has been capable of so far, the only unique device identifier apps on their platform can get access to is the one that you need to accept a prompt for. However, they know damn well that there are ways of fingerprinting devices that they can’t prevent (without fucking up the user experience) so it would be dishonest to pretend that saying “no” blocks these attempts.

    Apps requiring accounts to be useful, for instance, can be tracked by the user ID on the app’s end. That’s not something Apple can ever prevent through technical means.