The owner of Snapchat looked at ways of circumventing Apple’s new privacy rules, which will likely ban apps from collecting data on iPhone users without their explicit consent. Snap has admitted exploring how to track users with data from third party companies ahead of Apple’s expected introduction of new privacy rules, which will see millions of iPhone users opt to decline to be tracked. Snap is the biggest U.S. tech company so far to have admitted to researching workarounds that would likely violate Apple’s rules. According to internal documents seen by the Financial Times, Snap wanted to gather data from companies that analyze whether people have responded to ad campaigns, including aggregated IP addresses, the labels that identify devices connected to the internet. It hoped it could take that data and cross-reference it against the information it holds on its own users to identify and track them, in a technique known as “probabilistic matching,” according to several people familiar with its plans. Snap told the outlet it had always intended to discontinue the program after Apple introduces its changes, as such a system would not be compliant.
