Apple’s marketing suggests that iPhone users can’t be tracked. The truth is quite different.

Apple has built its tech empire on (overpriced?) hardware – and that is the starting point (despite the continued attempted forays into services, and despite the significance of the App Store, and related censorship) – that is the basis on which Apple continues to build its PR case 0f being “better for privacy” than its Big Tech peers.

The premise is that the others rely too heavily on their mass data harvesting for the digital ad market business model to worry about anything like privacy, while Apple’s alleged “hardware first” approach naturally lets it be the more “privacy-friendly” of the tech juggernauts.

But things are far from being that simple.