2.5.6 Limit Ad tracking and personalized Ads

Information

Apple provides a framework that allows advertisers to target Apple users and end-users with advertisements. While many people prefer that when they see advertising it is relevant to them and their interests, the detailed information that is data mining collected, correlated, and available to advertisers in repositories is often disconcerting. This information is valuable to both advertisers and attackers and has been used with other metadata to reveal users' identities.

Organizations should manage advertising settings on computers rather than allow users to configure the settings.

Apple Information

Ad tracking should be limited on 10.15 and prior.

Rationale:

Organizations should manage user privacy settings on managed devices to align with organizational policies and user data protection requirements.

Impact:

Uses will see generic advertising rather than targeted advertising. Apple warns that this will reduce the number of relevant ads.

Solution

Perform the following to set limited ad tracking:

Open System Preferences

Select Security & Privacy

Select Privacy

Select Advertising

Set Limit Ad Tracking

Terminal Method:
For each needed user, run the following command to enable limited ad tracking:

$ sudo -u <username> defaults -currentHost write /Users/<username>/Library/Preferences/com.apple.Adlib.plist forceLimitAdTracking -bool true

example:

$ sudo -u seconduser defaults -currentHost write /Users/seconduser/Library/Preferences/com.apple.Adlib.plist forceLimitAdTracking -bool true

See Also

https://workbench.cisecurity.org/files/3421