For those who like old-fashioned reading,
this is the article those screenshots are from.
My best guess of what's going on, from this snippet:
Quote:
Uber had been secretly identifying and tagging iPhones even after its app had been deleted and the devices erased — a fraud detection maneuver that violated Apple’s privacy guidelines.
I'm guessing that what Uber did was...
- leave some kind of unerasable cookie behind on a device that uniquely identifies that device to Uber, even if the app is uninstalled
- being that this is related to fraud detection, that's
probably so that if a user uses a fake CC or does something shady to Uber, then Uber is still able to tell who that user is if they delete the app and reinstall it; I believe that how things are
supposed to work is that if someone uninstalls and reinstalls your app, you can't tell if they're the same person or not until they give you some piece of identifying information (i.e. logging in to an account or whatever), but that possibly puts Uber in a situation where users engaging in fraud can burn them again
What the article doesn't necessarily say to me (from the early part, I haven't read most of it yet and I'm not sure if they go deeper into this specific issue) is that Uber was tracking users or getting data from/about them while the Uber app was not installed. That's not to say Uber was doing nothing wrong, clearly when their app is uninstalled they're not supposed to leave anything behind, and it does seem curious that iOS didn't ensure all app data is deleted upon uninstalling.