The App Store’s new Personalized Collections feature gives you tailored app recommendations based on your behavior. Sounds great for finding new apps that you might like, but security researchers say the feature uses a tracking mechanism that logs every single tap you make in the App Store, with no way to opt out.
This means Apple might record all your search queries, every app page you visit, and even how fast you type. If you happen to use an iPhone, Apple could be collecting this data right now.
App Store’s Personalized Collections: What is it actually tracking?
Buried under ads and lookalike apps, the App Store’s app discovery mechanism was broken for years, and Personalized Collections might fix that by suggesting which apps are actually worth downloading. It sounds like a very good idea, but the problem is the collected data.
Announced last week during WWDC26, Apple described Personalized Collections as a new “way to connect users with experiences they are looking for.” It also benefits app developers who want iPhone owners to find and use their software.
“To help more people find apps and games they will love, the App Store will introduce new Personalized Collections based on user interests, along with App Notes that explain why specific apps are recommended,” Apple said in a press release. “These tailored recommendations can appear on the Apps, Games, and Search tabs, evolving over time based on a user’s app usage and downloads.”
Security researchers at Mysk looked into Personalized Collections to see how the feature works. They recently shared their findings on X after analyzing data sent to Apple’s servers. And the collected data seems to go well beyond basic usage metrics.
“Apple is putting the extensive identifiable analytics they collect in the App Store in action,” Mysk wrote on June 9. “They record every tap and there’s no way to turn it off. They can even calculate your typing speed.”
In a follow-up post, Mysk described an experiment.
“Just for fun, I generated a 1000-character text and pasted it in the search field in the App Store,” Mysk wrote Thursday. “Well, the analytics captured the entire text, linked it to my ID and sent it to Apple, before even pushing ‘enter’. Now imagine you accidentally paste something private in there.”
It’s like a continuous stream of in-app behavior that’s granular enough for Apple to know your typing speed. Researchers said the collected data showed up in their personal Apple account archive, which anyone can download from privacy.apple.com.
Mysk also said that this sort of data collection by Apple is not new.
“Apple has been doing it at least since iOS 14 when we discovered it,” Mysk wrote Wednesday on X. “All data collected is NOT anonymous. The data is associated with your Apple ID. This means that given a court order, Apple has to hand this data to law enforcement.”
For years, Apple has marketed itself as a privacy-first company and even pitched hardware based on that promise. But if Apple indeed logs every single tap you make, with no way to opt out, that raises a huge privacy concern.
Apple did not reply to Cult of Mac‘s questions about how the feature works.
