2.5.9 Review Advertising settings

Information

Apple provides a framework that allows advertisers to target Apple users and end users to tailor their tolerance for what is shared with advertisers and what amount of targeting they will accept. While many people prefer that when they see advertising it is relevant to them and their interests the detailed information that is available with data mining collected information available in repositories to advertisers is often disconcerting.

Organizations may prefer to manage advertising settings on managed computers rather than allow users to configure the settings.

Apple Information

On macOS one suggested control is to limit ad tracking.

Rationale:

Organizations should manage user provacy settings on managed devices to align with organizational policies and user data protection requirements.

Solution

Perform the following to set limited ad tracking:

Open System Preferences

Select Security & Privacy

Select Privacy

Select Advertising

Set Limit Ad Tracking

Terminal Method:
For each needed user, run the following command to enable limited ad tracking:

$ sudo -u <username> defaults -currentHost write /Users/<username>/Library/Preferences/com.apple.Adlib.plist forceLimitAdTracking -bool true

example:

$ sudo -u seconduser defaults -currentHost write /Users/seconduser/Library/Preferences/com.apple.Adlib.plist forceLimitAdTracking -bool true

See Also

https://workbench.cisecurity.org/files/3013

Item Details

Category: CONFIGURATION MANAGEMENT

References: 800-53|CM-7b.

Plugin: Unix

Control ID: 8c60c0e706d44c7f1485af5ee0e0b60b5108fd46cb3bfeb4e0dd8c75414d44e3