A cookieless and privacy-first future isn’t too far away. In the future, people may view it as rather old-fashioned that there was a time where we allowed unfettered access to deeply personal information, such as location and website activity, to multiple third parties who would then use this information to drive consumption.

Apple continues to lead the way when it comes to consumer privacy and data protection

Interestingly, there aren’t many open talks about how this evolution began — when Apple removed the operability of cookies on Safari in 2017. Now, privacy and consumer data protection have become a key business strategy for Apple, as evidenced by the lack of data available on iOS devices and how little leaks out of their ecosystem.

While Google recently announced its decision to delay plans to phase out third-party cookies in Chrome a year later than expected, this has not stopped the continuous testing of FLOCs across millions of Chrome users. And while this offers a slight reprieve to brands who continue to rely on third-party cookies to target audiences overly, one thing is certain: Cookies, and by-default-tracking, data collection and scale within third-party data, will be gone in a few years.

However, in typical Apple fashion, the revolutionary tech brand has decided to jump the gun on its competitors — even in the land of data privacy. In a recent iOS update, Apple introduced App Tracking Transparency (ATT). Several apps found on an iPhone will use cookies to follow a user’s movements and other movements outside of the app; ATT enables users to opt out of this tracking.

For those apps — and, perhaps more acutely, the brands that own them — this app tracking feature causes problems for their advertising efforts because they can no longer see what their users and potential customers are looking at. Thus, it becomes more challenging to target them, which, of course, is only a problem if users opt-out of app tracking.

What UK marketers can infer from U.S. statistics

The U.K. has been opting into cookies for a few years now since the introduction of GDPR. However, this is likely to do with most publishers making it significantly easier to opt-in than to opt-out.

For many brands, the bad news is that ATT opts users out of tracking by default. As a result, Flurry Analytics found that 96% of U.S. iPhone users opted out of app tracking when iOS 14.5 was released at the end of April.

What does this mean for the U.K.? Though the research is U.S.-based, it might not be a giant leap to suggest that similar results have transpired across the Atlantic Ocean. And, according to StatCounter, 48.97% of U.K. smartphone users owned an iPhone in August 2021.

In short, a case could be made that very nearly …read more

Source:: Digiday

Author: Aaron