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David Gonzales was a home contractor in Elbow Lake, Minn. Population 1,200. For years, he would tear down old walls and put up new ones for his customers. He had a fun habit while renovating homes — he would leave a quarter between the walls, hoping that sometime in the future someone would find the tiny treasure with the date on it.

In 2013, he purchased his first home for $10,000 and it was in dire need of restoration. As he was tearing down the walls, he noticed the old house was insulated with newspapers — which was common practice back in the 1930s when the house was first built.

As he removed the newspapers from between the walls, he noticed what looked like a comic book stuck between the pages of the newspapers. When he pulled it out and looked at it, he saw he was holding a copy of Superman Action Comics #1, dated 1938.

So Gonzales went home and looked it up on the Internet. That's when he realized Action Comics #1 was valuable. His Superman comic was not pristine, as it had stood between the walls for seventy-five years. The cover had a rip, the pages were yellow from age. But Gonzales eventually put it up for auction — where it sold for $175,000.

Someone had either tucked that comic book between the newspaper pages as insulation, or like David Gonzales, they had left it there hoping someone in the future would find the tiny treasure with the date on it.

That tiny treasure was worth 16 times the cost of David Gonzales's house.

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Apple Inc. rolled out a software update for its mobile devices on Monday that gives users the option of stopping apps from tracking their location and sharing other identifying information with third parties.

The Cupertino, Calif.-based technology giant launched the latest version of its operating software, iOS 14.5, to the more than one billion people with iPhones around the world, including Canada, starting Monday morning.

While the upgrade contains a number of changes, one of the biggest is the addition of a beefed up privacy requirement the company is calling App Tracking Transparency, which any app that "collects data about end users and shares it with other companies for purposes of tracking across apps and websites" must abide by.

Services such as Facebook and others currently have the ability to track users on mobile devices in order to learn more about them to target advertisements and other location-based services to them. In some instances, the tracking is in place even if the user is not actively using the app in question.

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Apps can still monitor users
To be clear, apps will still be able to monitor their users even if they decline.

The iOS user agreement will still allow data collection if it is spelled out in an app's privacy policy. The changes only affect whether app developers share data they collect with third parties, or mix their data with outside data from third parties to help target ads.

So users will still be targeted by ads, even if they decline.

A social network like Facebook, for example, can still target ads based on first-party data of their own, such as which Facebook groups users join or which posts they like. But if Facebook wants to target ads based on data from which third-party websites people have used their Facebook credentials to log into, it will need to seek explicit permission.