It seems scarcely credible that it’s completely legal for a company to buy and sell our personal data without our consent, but that’s the reality in the US.
Your personal data is available for sale
Apple provides a number of features intended to help us protect our privacy online. These include App Tracking Transparency, Hide My Email, and iCloud Private Relay. Using these tools can help us avoid adding to our public digital footprint.
What they cannot do is help with the personal data already exposed. Most people are surprised when they learn just how much information marketeers and scammers can find out about them by purchasing it from data brokers.
Those 30-page terms and conditions you agree to when you download a new app or register with a new website very often include innocuous-sounding clauses like granting permission to “share data with selected partners.” What that actually means is that data as sensitive as your location history can be sold to data brokers – who then resell it to anyone able to pay for it.
