Apple Upgrade Tracks Customers Even When Marketing Apps Are Off

The people who design marketing apps are celebrating a change in the way iBeacon works on iPhones. iBeacon has been around for a while, and marketers liked the concept in principle.

But there was a big practical problem: It only worked when a customer's phone was running the marketer's app. Once you closed the app, the tracking stopped. That problem has now been fixed.

When Apple updated the iPhone's operating system in February 2014, it changed it to allow marketing apps to keep tabs on your location even when they're off. When you close an app, it "deputizes" the phone's operating system to keep listening for iBeacon signals on its behalf. Of course, the change has others spooked.

"As a privacy researcher, I always get nervous when marketers are celebratory about something," says Garrett Cobarr, a technologist and writer based in Seattle. He says Apple seems to ignore certain assumptions that people make about what's happening on a device.