The article in [2] says that Apple is backtracking on their privacy policy, without ever specifying what stated Apple policy they were not adhering to.
"Ask Apps not to Track" was about an advertiser you did not have a relationship with, building profiles across multiple organizations to profile you without any consent. So a policy was created where apps did have to prompt, and to make it a business requirement to work with Apple. If you track without explicit OS-gathered user consent, you can be kicked from the store. AFAIK, even if you do so via means like IP address correlation.
But the feature wasn't "privacy", it was "ask apps not to track". It is very clearly specified about whether you want multiple organizations to correlate you. It is not meant to be a policy to limit e.g. what the Meta learns about you while you are interacting within Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp.
That's a deeply cynical way to view things, and exactly what people here are afraid of happening.
Clearly the iOS marketing of the past few years has led people to believe that Apple is opposed to advertising technologies that rely on persistently-stored and correlated user behavior, because that persistent store can be plausibly (and terribly) misused.
And remember that the misuse itself hasn't really happened anywhere. People like to complain about Facebook and Google's (also Amazon's, and TikTok is in this conversation now too) accumulation of this data, but so far the actual abuses haven't happened. Tech companies have been, on the whole, actually pretty good stewards of this stuff. But people hate that they have it anyway, and mistrust them.
"Ask Apps not to Track" was about an advertiser you did not have a relationship with, building profiles across multiple organizations to profile you without any consent. So a policy was created where apps did have to prompt, and to make it a business requirement to work with Apple. If you track without explicit OS-gathered user consent, you can be kicked from the store. AFAIK, even if you do so via means like IP address correlation.
But the feature wasn't "privacy", it was "ask apps not to track". It is very clearly specified about whether you want multiple organizations to correlate you. It is not meant to be a policy to limit e.g. what the Meta learns about you while you are interacting within Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp.