With the introduction of iOS 14.5, Apple finally released the highly anticipated app tracking transparency feature. It’s incredibly useful when you want to have precise control over which apps can track other aspects of your digital activity. Of course, this assumes that the function is not grayed out for you.
There appear to be a number of iOS users who don’t seem to have access to Apple’s App Tracking Transparency feature at all. When they pull up Settings> Privacy> TrackingIf the setting is there, there is no way you can adjust it. This is how it looks in both cases, where the top is not gray and the bottom is gray:
Apple recently released a support page Describing three scenarios in which this critical switch may not allow you to adapt:
- For users with child accounts or under the age of 18 up to the year of birth who are signed in with their Apple ID
- If your Apple ID is managed by a school or has a configuration profile that restricts tracking
- If your Apple ID was created in the last 3 days
However, this list does not cover all experiences. And I’ve seen all sorts of troubleshooting techniques that people have tried hoping to toggle the app tracking transparency switch – right up to restoring their iPhone from a backup or doing a factory reset.
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You don’t have to get that extreme, however. If you can’t turn on “Allow apps to request the track” it’s annoying, but it could be a lot worse. The disabled status means that you are denying apps the ability to request additional permissions to track apps. By default, when this option is disabled, apps are subject to the following restrictions:
… the app developer cannot access the IDFA (System Advertising Identifier), which is often used for tracking. The app is also not allowed to track your activity based on other information that identifies you or your device, such as: B. Your email address.
So it’s really an annoying problem that might be a bug, but it just keeps you from relaxing, not improving, your privacy. If you need to have an un-blasted setting, I recommend the following:
- Start with strategic reboots: Restart your iPhone, sign in and out of the App Store, then try signing in and out of iCloud (especially via Settings> Apple ID> Media & Purchasessome of which claim to have had success). Note that you may only be able to turn on the toggle temporarily. So after a few hours, check again whether you can still adjust it.
Try too Restart your iPhone After signing out (one at a time), sign back in when your iPhone boots up again.
- Customize “Personalized Recommendations”: You can find this setting via Settings> Privacy> Apple Advertisingis another troubleshooting technique that I mentioned. I’m not sure why this would connect directly to app requests, but it’s a simple toggle on and off that is worth 10 seconds to try.
- Upgrade to iOS 14.6 Beta 1: This is a little more drastic, but I’ve also seen reports that people were able to “unlock” the feature by upgrading to the developer beta of the next iOS update. I wouldn’t recommend this if you absolutely need a sturdy iPhone that will have all of your apps and features working flawlessly very first developer beta for iOS 14.6– but it’s an option.
Note that graying out the option is different from enabling it and the lack of apps to manage. The latter is normal, expected behavior; If an app needs these permissions, or if you install a new one that it wants, the app will ask you and let you change your decision when it shows up on this screen. If there is nothing right now, don’t sweat.
