The Rundown: Apple’s ATT Privacy crackdown, a year on

By Seb Joseph

When Apple made it more difficult to track its customers a year ago, it threw advertisers, publishers and ad tech vendors into a state of panic. Some were in denial about what was happening, while others grieved over the possible implications. There were those that sought workarounds alongside the ones that tried to adapt. Even the big platforms were thrown into disarray. A year on, and the panic has turned to pragmatism in many cases.

Here is what we know — and don’t know — about Apple’s crackdown on tracking.

But first, a recap…

On this day a year ago, Apple started asking people whether they wanted to be tracked by apps on their devices via a feature called App Tracking Transparency (ATT). Doing so, went the thinking, would give people more control over what happened to their data. In fairness, that control was already there. If someone didn’t want to share their data with an app, all they had to do was say so in the settings of their device. But that was only possible if the person knew how to do it. ATT gave them that explicit control regardless. It required developers to ask whether a person was OK with their app tracking them. If they said yes, then everything works just like it did before. If they said no, though, then the developer can’t track that person using their data in the app, or sell it on to other companies.

Sounds great for users, bad for advertisers.

Put simply, yes. As ever, however, the devil is in the details. Tracking people on Apple devices is a lot more difficult than it ever was since the arrival of ATT—- that much is clear by the fact the identifier used to carry that personal data really did go away when people opted against being tracked by an app. Bad news for any company involved in gathering, processing and selling that data. Or, at least it was for those that accepted Apple’s bid to be the referee of personal privacy on its devices. They declared attribution bankruptcy on the old approach and decided to make the new data-lite way work for them. In turn, they left themselves at a disadvantage. Some companies, perhaps unsurprisingly, continued to track people irrespective of whether they had the explicit consent to do so. They gambled on the idea that Apple would find it hard to referee how much data is collected from someone’s device. And they were right. The persistence of the much-maligned practice of fingerprinting after the arrival of ATT is a testament to this. Indeed, the risks of being caught flouting Apple’s rules, are seemingly worth it for many companies — at least until they’re not.

Wait. I thought Apple was serious about privacy?

It is. Remember, Apple has had a strong stance on privacy for the past several years — ever since it throttled tracking in its browser in 2017, in fact. So, its attempt to do similar in-app is definitely …read more

Source:: Digiday