As you read this, there’s an army of bots pretending to be Apple users surfing the web and looking at ads, according to new research shared exclusively with Gizmodo. The ad fraud scheme is weaponizing a privacy feature called Private Relay, coopting a vast swath of traffic to show ads to robots and costing advertisers tens of millions of dollars in the process, researchers’ tests found. Apple has promised that the tool has “built-in fraud detection” and that advertising platforms can trust it, but the researchers say the fraud has only gotten worse in the months since they first reported it to the company.
The new report finds that criminals are exploiting Apple’s Private Relay tool, a feature available on on Apple devices for users who subscribe to iCloud+. Turn it on, and Private Relay will hide your web browsing and assign you a dummy IP address to help stop companies from tracking you. Pixalate, the ad tech firm that authored the study, released Wednesday, says the problem will cost US advertisers an estimated $65 million in 2022 alone. The study finds that 90% of web traffic that looks like it’s coming from Private Relay is actually fraudulent.
In general, the problem described in the report doesn’t have a direct effect on Apple users. Instead, ad fraudsters are pretending to be among them, researchers said. According to Pixalate, fraudsters are taking advantage of misplaced trust in Apple and…
