While the top-of-the-line iPhone is considered more secure than Android, a new report reveals that many popular iPhone apps are secretly spying on users through push notifications.

As reported by Gizmodo, security researchers at app developer Mysk have released a new video detailing how some iOS apps are circumventing Apple privacy rules and collecting user data in the background.

Starting with the release of iOS 10 in 2016, Apple added a feature to the iPhone that allows apps to customize push notifications even when a particular app is not running; in a post to X, the Mysk researcher explains that this feature can be exploited by "data-hungry apps, triggering push notifications to send app analytics and device information to a remote server."

If you're worried that your iPhone is spying on you, here's everything you need to know about how push notifications are being exploited by popular apps and what you can do to prevent additional data from being collected on you and your smartphone here.

To make their research easier to understand, Mysk has released a video (embedded below) detailing how push notifications can be exploited in iOS to collect user data even when the app is not running.

When iOS allows apps to run and customize push notifications, detailed device information, including system uptime, locale, keyboard language, available memory, battery status, device model, display brightness, etc., can be It could be sent back to the company's servers. All of this information is commonly used for fingerprinting, which Apple strictly forbids in both iOS and iPadOS.

According to Mysk's own testing, such practices are more common than the company's security researchers expected. Worse, some apps like Facebook and TikTok also send data when clearing notifications in the Notification Center; other apps like Gmail and YouTube collect only data related to the handling of notifications, according to the company's security researchers.

Currently, it may be possible to collect additional user data using push notifications, but Mysk concludes his post by saying that starting this spring, Apple will require developers to explain why they are using APIs that return unique device signals, such as those often used for fingerprint identification He points out.

So what if you want to limit the companies behind these popular apps from collecting additional data from your iPhone? There is good news and bad news.

You can prevent push notifications from being used to collect data about you and your smartphone, but to do so you need to turn off push notifications altogether. Unfortunately, setting notification alerts to a sound or badge is not enough; you must disable push notifications altogether.

If you are truly concerned about apps collecting data, we recommend using one of the best VPNs, or more specifically the best iPhone VPN, to further protect your privacy. Likewise, you might want to enable Advanced Data Protection on your iPhone. Doing so will disable web access to iCloud, though.

Want to protect your iPhone from hackers as well? Intego Mac Internet Security X9 or Intego Mac Premium Bundle X9 will scan your iPhone or iPad for malware when it is connected to your Mac with a USB cable. Intego's product is featured in our list of best Mac antivirus software, but it is also the closest thing to an iOS version of the best Android antivirus app due to Apple's own malware scanning limitations.

Now that Apple seems to have sniffed out that app developers are abusing push notifications to collect additional user data, the iPhone maker will likely severely limit the features that allow it with the release of iOS 18.