Previous: Stop The Mac App Store is not obsolete Articles index Jeff Johnson (My apps, PayPal.Me, Mastodon)

November 10 2025

Today I received a shipment notification via text message to my phone number from a company unrelated to Apple. The shipped product was not ordered with my iPhone, and in fact the product manufacturer doesn’t even know that I own any Apple devices. The message included a US Postal Service tracking number. Messages app on my iPhone transformed the tracking number into a link. When I pressed down on the link to reveal the URL, I was surprised by it:

https://trackingshipment.apple.com/?Company=USPS&Locale=&TrackingNumber=

My tracking number, which I won’t post here, was appended to the URL. If I had tapped on the link generated by Messages app, it would have sent my tracking number not to the US Postal Service but to Apple!

Messages app is apparently “smart enough” to recognize that there’s a USPS tracking number in the text message but not smart enough to use a USPS tracking URL:

https://tools.usps.com/go/TrackConfirmAction?qtc_tLabels1=

With my tracking number, Apple could learn information about me and my consumer habits. Moreover, Apple could easily associate my tracking number with my Apple account via the IP address of my URL requests, because iPhones constantly phone home to Apple for various logged in services, such as the App Store.

I’m not claiming that Apple will use or abuse this data. I’m just claiming that it’s possible, and it shouldn’t be possible. Apple intentionally sending itself our tracking numbers is what makes it possible for Apple to connect the dots. It wouldn’t be possible if Apple never received that data in the first place.

According to Apple marketing:

Privacy. That’s Apple.

Privacy is a fundamental human right. It’s also one of our core values. Which is why we design our products and services to protect it. That’s the kind of innovation we believe in.

But I don’t believe the marketing. Apple has inserted itself where it doesn’t belong with this Messages “feature,” or misfeature. Why does Apple want to send itself our tracking numbers? Apple tracking is the opposite of privacy!

In general, I get the impression that Apple simply exempts itself from its definition of “privacy.” Only other companies can track you, not Apple, despite the vast amount of data that Apple collects from all of its customers. Apple considers itself implicitly trustworthy, so Apple customers are not supposed to worry about giving all of their data to Apple. I use Little Snitch to stop macOS from phoning home in many cases, but unfortunately Apple does not allow any software like Little Snitch to exist on iOS. This limitation is supposedly for our own “protection.” If you want to see how much iOS phones home, install Little Snitch on your Mac and then run an iOS simulator in Apple’s Xcode developer tools. You might be surprised too.

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