Apple in its loving and kindness decides to include a big hurdle for app developers to cross and that’s the security issues which have everything to do with privacy whereby people get tracked without their consent on their own devices.
The new feature got rolled out with the iOS 14.5 which now require you give your consent to applications that tries to track you.
While this is a really nice thing to have, not many people are able to get this feature to work as the toggle button to get the feature to work is grayed out on some people’s iPhone however, the issue seems to have been rectified by Apple.
If you’re in for tracking, you can toggle the feature off but if you are privacy conscious and want to explicitly grant permission to certain apps on your device, then follow this short guide on how to turn on or turn off app tracking transparency feature on the iOS 14.5.
How to allow/block iPhone app tracking
There are some application that are built around user tracking and might misbehave if the app tracking feature is turned on.
There are two ways to turning on the app tracking feature on your iPhone:
- When you open an app on your iPhone running the current iOS 14.5 for the first time, you’ll get a prompt asking you explicitly whether to be tracked or not. Check the image below out.
Now if you click to allow the tracking for that application, it will then get to appear in your Tracking settings which can be managed at any time.
Here’s where to find that:
- On your iPhone, head to Settings
- Swipe down and tap Privacy
- Choose Tracking at the top
- The default setting is to allow apps to ask for permission to track you
- Toggle it off to block all apps from being able to track you – and even ask to track
- Choose “Ask Apps to Stop Tracking” or “Allow Apps to Continue Tracking” for any you’ve already approved
- If/when you do give permission for an app to track you, you’ll see a list of them under the Privacy > Tracking settings
- You can block tracking at any time for individual apps by tapping the toggle next to it
As stated earlier, some users find it difficult to use the feature because the setting gets grayed out but Apple made it known that if you have an Apple ID managed by a configuration profile or if its a children’s account, the feature will not work/disabled.
However, there have been a number of reports of people that don’t fall into those circumstances still having trouble. Hopefully, we’ll see a fix soon (some have reported signing out of iCloud and back in fixes the problem, but that can be an undertaking).
Here’s how these steps look:
For now, there doesn’t appear to be a quick way to allow tracking for an app if you said “Ask App Not to Track” with the initial prompt. However, you can delete and redownload the app and you should get the tracking prompt again.
There is no quick way to allow tracking for an app once you click on “Ask App Not to Track” just within the initial prompt.
But its possible to get this again if you can simply delete the application and then reinstall it. As stated earlier, when you open the app for the first time, you’ll get a fresh prompt.
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