Marketers fret as Apple’s hardline stance on tracking gets firmer

By Seb Joseph

Marketers continue to avoid Apple’s harsh reality of a world without individual tracking, but it’s getting harder to avoid the consequences of doing so.

This realization is getting starker among marketers trying to make sense of Apple’s barrage of privacy safeguards just days after they were announced at its Worldwide Developers Conference. In fact, there’s a growing consensus in the days since the event that the company has spent a lot of time thinking through ways to close off potential loopholes in its privacy plan.

Whether it’s allowing people to obfuscate their email address or becoming the place where they upload their government-issued identity, Apple’s devices are being positioned as safe havens bereft of shady tracking techniques. Time will tell how this shakes out, but Apple is clearly trying to close the gap between the perception of its commitment to privacy and reality.

“Much of Apple’s privacy moves are designed to block fingerprinting and the use of alternative third-party identifiers,” said Shumel Lais, CEO of mobile advertising intelligence business Appsumer.

In this regard, the latest updates make it even more difficult for companies to get away with this type of malfeasance. It clearly didn’t sit well with Apple that some marketers were still using fingerprinting, or gathered up data points on someone’s device to identify them without their consent, despite the presence of the App Tracking Transparency barrier.

New tools like the “App Privacy Report” will provide some transparency here, giving Apple’s customers an overview of how apps are using their data, whether that’s what data is being shared or which third-party properties the app is contacting. This overview should make it easier for people to spot if and when apps are abusing their privacy. As Lais explained: “The transparency of the new ‘App Privacy Report’ will remove some of these underhand tactics and likely lead to apps that flout the rules being rejected by the App Store.”

But Apple’s reality check for privacy mavericks doesn’t stop there.

When the company removed third-party cookies from Safari in 2017, it effectively deleted the workhorse for identity from the bid stream. In response, marketers started to use IP addresses to build a fingerprint as a replacement identifier. Now, Apple has put those workarounds on notice with its own version of a Virtual Privacy Network to hide IP address information — Private Relay.

In a nutshell, the service lets people mask their IP address by sending their browser traffic through two relays. There are, however, concessions that limit the scope of this safeguard. Not only will the service be unavailable in certain markets like China, but it will also only be restricted to non-encrypted traffic for apps. In other words, Private Relay is a layer in addition to any other encryption on the traffic — albeit one that’s far from functionally ideal.

Nevertheless, it serves as another reminder to marketers that only Apple has access to new iOS users.

“It’s because IP addresses have a consent issue, and any attempt by ad tech to avoid that consent flow is seen as a …read more

Source:: Digiday