It’s also worth mentioning that apples prompt gives no benefit to tracking. It basically just asks “Facebook wants to track you. OPT OUT, or not”. Who is going to agree to that?
If Apple gave developers a way to add a benefit or two, eg personalized experience or whatever, I bet we would see that % be much lower
There’s [essentially] no contentful benefit to any major site’s tracking any more, [almost] nothing is ‘collaboratively filtered” and “personalized” around the content and your interests, [by and large] only around ad placement performance or conversion.
The only remaining arguable benefit is that you will see “more relevant” ads, in other words, instead of seeing ads from whoever pays the most for your [well guessed] demographic, you’ll see endless “retargeted” begging for you to buy the thing you ordered last week.
My "allow apps to ask to track" setting defaulted to off, too. Not sure what determines that, but in my case, I never even got the option to opt-in; the dialog never comes up because apps aren't even allowed to try asking me.
I'm presumably in that 96%, but it wasn't an explicit choice. (I'd have opted-out, obviously.)
If Apple gave developers a way to add a benefit or two, eg personalized experience or whatever, I bet we would see that % be much lower