We’re roughly nine months removed from the day Apple turned the digital advertising industry on its head. Now just a few weeks from the release of iOS 14.5, we’re starting to see some seismic changes across the board.
Last summer, Apple announced that its next iteration of mobile operating systems would require application developers to explicitly request permission from its users to track them across other applications and websites visited on the device. Overlooking permission was established as standard practice up until Apple’s controversial announcement, with many companies tracking user habits to provide them with targeted advertisements (and in turn making money).
Per Apple, “examples of tracking include, but are not limited to:
“Displaying targeted advertisements in your app based on user data collected from apps and websites owned by other companies.
Sharing device location data or email lists with a data broker.
Sharing a list of emails, advertising IDs, or other IDs with a third-party advertising network that uses that information to retarget those users in other developers’ apps or to find similar users.
Placing a third-party SDK in your app that combines user data from your app with user data from other developers’ apps to target advertising or measure advertising efficiency, even if you don’t use the SDK for these purposes. For example, using an analytics SDK that repurposes the data it collects from your app to enable targeted advertising in other developers’ apps.”
Some companies have taken an oppositional stance to Apple’s changes, though none more aggressively than a fellow Silicon Valley giant: Facebook.
Mark Zuckerberg and Co. have criticized Apple’s groundbreaking decision, arguing that preventing targeted advertisements would have a drastically negative impact on small businesses that thrive off of the practice.
...not to mention it would also impact Facebook’s ability to make money of its own, as the company has also (massively) participated in targeted advertising thanks to the (massive amounts of) data it collects from its users.
Facebook will likely be OK. Small businesses that rely on social media marketing to push their relatively unknown products to users who may otherwise never see them, however, may not. Apple, though, doesn’t believe that this is an excuse to compromise a user’s privacy.
But while Facebook has been on the offensive, others have decided to adapt.
Last week, Google announced it would no longer sell advertisements based on a person’s individual browsing history across websites, appearing to fall in line with Apple’s decision to prioritize privacy over profit.
"If digital advertising doesn't evolve to address the growing concerns people have about their privacy and how their personal identity is being used, we risk the future of the free and open web," said David Temkin, director of product management, ads privacy and trust at Google.
"People shouldn't have to accept being tracked across the web in order to get the benefits of relevant advertising. And advertisers don’t need to track individual consumers across the web to get the performance benefits of digital advertising.”
Temkin adds that advances in Federated Learning of Cohorts (FloC) — a new way to enable interest-based ads on the web — appear to provide an effective way of removing third-party cookies from advertising algorithms and instead “hide individuals within large crowds of people with common interests.”
“This points to a future where there is no need to sacrifice relevant advertising and monetization in order to deliver a private and secure experience,” Temkin writes.
LinkedIn has also taken measures to improve its reputation with consumers who appreciate privacy. While most other applications will be asking users for permission to use Identifiers for Advertising (IDFA) via Apple’s App Tracking Transparency prompt, LinkedIn says its ending the practice altogether on iOS.
“We have decided to stop our iOS apps’ collection of IDFA data for now,” the company wrote in a blog post. “Although this change affects the LinkedIn Audience Network (LAN), Conversion Tracking, and Matched Audiences, we expect limited impact to your campaign performance, and don’t foresee major changes required for your campaign set-up.”
Twitter has also chimed in, with company CFO Ned Segal stating that the changes may actually stand to benefit their platform in the long run.
“IDFA in a way is going to level the playing field. We’re in an industry where many were much better than Twitter historically at leveraging all of the data that was available to them, from the device ID to what people were doing on other websites,” Segal said at the Morgan Stanley Technology, Media and Telecom Conference (h/t CNBC). “When we all have the same set of new challenges that we have to face, leveling the playing field will be a really interesting impact on the broader industry.”
Apple’s privacy shift is expected to be rolled out in the coming weeks.
