> In other words, almost every app in the App Store will have to declare "CA92.1" in a privacy manifest, and if every app has the same response, then nothing is accomplished except privacy theater and some unjustified good PR for Apple.
I disagree. It gives Apple a tool to refer to when an app says A but does B. If you are a malicious app and you lie about any of these things then kicking you off the App Store is a simple decision.
In the past you could get away with just doing it in code. Now you have to declare that your usage is non malicious. That is a huge difference.
> Now you have to declare that your usage is non malicious.
That's not even what you're declaring! I already quoted Apple's docs: "Declare this reason to access user defaults to read and write information that is only accessible to the app itself."
But sandboxing already makes this impossible, so the only thing you're declaring is that your app only does what the operating system allows it to do. Nothing about maliciousness or fingerprinting.
Moreover, the only way that Apple can actually detect fingerprinting is to reverse engineer the app, which Apple could do anyway regardless of whether developers self-report. Self-reporting is basically useless, because violators will simply lie.
Apple can already kick you out of the App Store for any reason, or no reason. And they could make a public rule against fingerprinting without requiring developer self-reporting, which is mostly a sham.
Why does the tool even matter? They already have no-fingerprinting rules. They can point at that, no need to have every dev on earth explain why they want users to stay logged it and not get the onboarding screen every time the app is opened.
I disagree. It gives Apple a tool to refer to when an app says A but does B. If you are a malicious app and you lie about any of these things then kicking you off the App Store is a simple decision.
In the past you could get away with just doing it in code. Now you have to declare that your usage is non malicious. That is a huge difference.