A privacy notice appears on an Apple device. Cross-app tracking is a requirement for developers of an application.
In an unacknowledged shift, Apple has allowed app developers to collect data from its 1 billion users for targeted advertising, allowing companies to follow a much looser interpretation of its controversial privacy policy.
In May, Apple launched an advert that featured a harassed man whose daily activities were monitored by a group of strangers. They vanished when he clicked on the "Ask App Not to Track" button. Apple told potential customers that if they choose an iPhone, they are choosing privacy.
In the seven months since, companies like Facebook and Snap have been allowed to keep sharing user-level signals from their phones, as long as they are not tied to specific user profiles.
Advertisers will be able to gain a more complete, real-time view on how ad campaigns are working with the data that will be shared by Snap. The data will be aggregated and obfuscated.
Facebook was engaged in a "multiyear effort to rebuild ad infrastructure using more aggregate or anonymized data", according to the company's operations chief.
These companies point out that Apple has told developers that they can't derive data from a device for the purpose of uniquely identifying it. This means that they can see signals from an iPhone at a group level, enabling ads that can still be tailored to align with certain behavior but not associated with unique IDs.
This type of tracking is becoming more and more common. The chief executive of AppsFlyer, a mobile attribution platform that works with app developers, said that when his company introduced a privacy-focused tool based on aggregated measurement in July 2020, the level of backlash was huge.
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95 percent of his clients now use aggregated solutions. He said that the market changed their minds.
It is not clear if Apple has blessed these solutions. Apple didn't answer specific questions for this article but it did say that privacy was its North Star and that it was setting a general destination.
Apple had to back off from a strict reading of its rules because of the disruption to the mobile ads industry, according to BlueConic's chief operating officer.
She said that Apple can't put themselves in a situation where they are basically gutted of their top-performing apps from a user-consumption perspective. That would hurt the operating system.
These solutions break the privacy rules set out for the users of the OS X operating system.
Lockdown Privacy said Apple's policy was useless in stopping third-party tracking. It observed that personal data and device information is still being sent to trackers in almost all cases.
The companies that aggregate user-level data said that the reason some apps leak information is because they need it to function. Advertisers need to know the user's language and screen size in order to make the app good.
The risk is that Apple will be trusting the same groups that Tim Cook has lambasted as "hucksters just looking to make a quick buck" if they are allowed to use user-level data.
Users won't really know if their data privacy has been preserved if they don't have access to the data behind the scenes.
She said that the black boxes hide a lot of sins. It is not unreasonable to assume that it leaves a lot to be desired.
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