Apple has revealed some more details about the privacy policy changes that are being discussed in iOS 14. The company said in a June 2020 announcement at WWDC that developers would have to ask users for permission to track and share IDFA for cross-property ad targeting. .. Meanwhile, when iOS 14 came out in the fall of 2020, Apple said it would like to postpone tracking limits until 2021 to give developers more time to make the necessary changes.
And a little more concrete timeline was revealed. The plan is to publish these changes early this spring, with a version that implements the feature in the next iOS 14 beta release.
Apple describes the new system as follows: “Users can see in’Settings’ which apps have requested tracking permission and made changes for it. The request was widespread early this spring and will be available on iOS 14, iPad OS 14 and tvOS 14 in the future. It will be implemented. This change has gained the support of privacy advocates around the world. ”
Here is a list of the most important and basic requirements:
- The App Tracking Transparency feature will change from the traditional method of disabling IDFA sharing unless each user opts out, to a method that must be opt-in to disable and enable it by default. Apps that want to share a user’s IDFA with a third party, such as a network or data broker, must ask the user for permission in advance.
- The most noticeable proof of this feature is that you’ll be notified when a new app launches, explain what the tracker is used for, and ask you to opt in to it.
- IDFA sharing can now be switched on a per-app basis at any time (previously a single switch). If you disable “Allow apps to request tracking”, no app will ask you to use tracking.
- Apple enforces this on all third-party data sources, including data sharing agreements, but the platform can use third-party data to advertise.
- Apple expects developers to understand that the APIs and SDKs used in their apps provide user data to brokers and other networks, and enable notifications if so.
- Apple will comply with the rules for its apps, and if the app does tracking, it will display a dialog and follow the “Allow apps to request tracking” settings. At this time, many apps aren’t tracking.
- An important caveat here is that switching personalized ads specifically allows or does not allow Apple to use its own first-party data to serve ads. It means that. So it’s an additional layer of opt-out that only affects Apple data.
Apple has also enhanced the Adtribution API to enable better clicks, video conversions, and app-to-web conversions.
The news was announced on Data Privacy Day, when CEO Tim Cook spoke on the issue at the Computers, Privacy and Data Protection conference in Brussels, Belgium, on the morning of January 28, Belgium. went. The company also released a new report showing that the average app has six third-party trackers.
While this change seems welcome from a privacy perspective, it has also been criticized by the advertising industry. Facebook, for example, has launched a PR campaign highlighting its impact on small businesses and has identified the change as “one of the biggest headwinds to advertising” in 2021. Apple’s stance is an advertiser-centric approach, a user-centric data privacy approach.