Do VPNs hide your iPhone data from apps?

VPN
1

I’m currently using a VPN on my iPhone, but does that hide the data of my iPhone from apps? I know VPNs hide your original IP, but does it hide your iCloud information or maybe even the IMEI or MEID of an iPhone (basically just more of the information that would be found on a specific iPhone)?

2

This is more of an iOS sandboxing question than a VPN question.

Apple takes privacy seriously, and as far as I am aware apps are not able to access information outside of their own “sandbox”, unless explicitly approved, like access to pictures, contacts, etc.

3

Apps can not get IMEI, MEID or UDID. They don’t have access to that information.

However, they can get a VEID identifierForVendor, as people with functioning brains call it, (ID specific to the install of apps by that vendor), your advertising ID (which usually doesn’t change but can be manually reset in settings), or generate a UUID of their own and save it with the app’s local data. So they can still track a unique install of their software, and if you ever use that software off of your VPN, they can correlate your real IP with that identifier. Essentially, unless you’re much more careful that anyone actually is with an iPhone, the VPN can’t protect you from being tracked through your apps.

4

No, your iPhone and everything in it is still the same a VPN only protects you from people outside the connection.

5

No, since the apps on your phone can access the data locally.

6

Thanks for the answer my man. Now, this is off-topic of a VPN, but, do you know any possible way to hide a VEID or possibly a UUID? Or maybe even reset them?

7

Thanks, I watched it.

8

What’s the extension he repeatedly uses to see the trackers? ( see 5:34)

Nevermind- see it’s NoScript at 10:52.

9

Thanks for the help man.

10

Here’s what Apple says about the VEID (I’m going crazy now, realizing that no one but me calls it that); anyway, “identifierForVendor” as sane people call it:

The value of this property is the same for apps that come from the same vendor running on the same device. A different value is returned for apps on the same device that come from different vendors, and for apps on different devices regardless of vendor.

The value in this property remains the same while the app (or another app from the same vendor) is installed on the iOS device. The value changes when the user deletes all of that vendor’s apps from the device and subsequently reinstalls one or more of them.

So you could uninstall that app and every app by the vendor to reset the vendor identifier.

A UUID is just a long random number that’s reasonably certain to be unique, and the app developer generates and controls that themselves. You can more or less guarantee that number is gone if you delete any app that might conceivably be storing it (such as apps from that vendor).

11

So, if I delete the app, the UUID and VEID should be gone, and if I reset my advertising ID along with both of those, the app should lose any information it had on me before, correct?

12

The value of this property is the same for apps that come from the same vendor running on the same device.

So, if I use Google mail app ‘raw’ and Google Search app via VPN, Google has my home IP? Pretty sure Google knows how many hairs I have on my … left eyebrow (what did you think I was going to say?) so it’s all moot…

13

As long as you get rid of everything you had installed by that vendor, yes, probably.

14

Yeah, definitely. But you could get around that one by just not using a search app; Use a browser (not chrome) for your searches.

15

Thanks for the help my man.

16

TY didn’t think of that. There should be an app for that - “how to get back to basics”