Report Highlights How Top Apple Executives Disagreed Over How Far iOS Anti-Tracking Measures Should Go

A new report shows how three top executives were at odds in early discussions about Apple's app tracking transparency framework.

According to the report from The Information, the executives who disagreed over how far Apple should go in protecting user privacy in digital advertising included Apple's Craig Federighi, who oversees software engineering, Phil Schiller, who manages the App Store, and Eddy Cue, Apple.

In 2020, Apple introduced App Tracking transparency, a feature that lets users decide if a specific app can track them across other apps and websites.

ATT hides a user's IDFA from apps that a user doesn't approve. According to the report, Eric Neuenschwander, the birther of the identifier, began to raise concerns over IDFA and how it was being used by apps to unethically track users.

Eventually, the ad industry began to use the IDFA in ways the privacy engineering team hadn't intended, building an entire tracking ecosystem around it. Unscrupulous developers started using it to gather location data on users and sell that information to data brokers for additional revenue.

Around this time, Neuenschwander privately began telling colleagues he regretted creating the IDFA, in part because others like Google followed with a similar identifier a year later, according to people who have worked with him.

Before ATT, Apple gave users the ability to limit ad tracking in their phones. The settings app hid the toggle and it was not used by users.

Neuenschwander's team started to find new ways to enforce a user's choice if they enabledLimit ad tracking, including hiding the identifier from apps if a user had indicated they did not want to.

As those efforts did not stop the improper use of IDFA, the head of software engineering at Apple stepped in to move forward with ATT.

Federighi agreed to allocate some resources of the software engineering department to those efforts when he told Eric Neuenschwander to do something about IDFA.

According to sources cited in the report, Apple's executives found themselves in disagreement as those efforts were underway.

Before Apple could make any such public announcement, three Apple senior vice presidents—Federighi, Cue and Schiller—had to come to a consensus about how far the feature would go in crimping tracking and how Apple could soften the expected impact the changes would have on developers.

The framework like ATT could affect the app store'secosystem and mobile ads that run within apps.

If new restrictions on the IDFA resulted in users seeing fewer ads, they might download fewer apps, which could lead to less in-app purchases, which Apple takes a cut of.

The report notes that the team was sensitive to the consequences of kneecapping the IDFA, and was concerned that ATT would go too far in eliminating tracking.

Federighi was for a framework such as ATT. Federighi saw a team of privacy-minded engineers who wanted to curtail the powers of an Apple tool that unscrupulous advertising companies, mobile developers and data brokers were exploiting to track the behavior of users.

The final version of ATT, which offers a simple prompt to users when they first open an app on whether they wanted to be tracked or not, was the result of the differing opinions of Apple's top executives.

ATT prompt users to see when they first open an app.

According to the report, Apple's initial idea for ATT was to let users disable tracking across all apps, but part of the concession reached by the executives was to offer a toggle for each app.

The trio eventually settled on a plan: iPhone users would have a choice of whether to opt into app tracking, which Apple executives felt was more defensible if developers and the online advertising industry pushed back, people familiar with the discussions said. They would also be able to do this on a per-app basis, which Apple executives also felt would benefit advertisers, a person familiar with the matter said. This was a big change from Apple's earlier IDFA controls, which enabled tracking across all apps by default.

Federighi ordered members of his software engineering department to begin developing ATT by June 2020, when Apple would officially showcase it at its Worldwide Developers Conference.

In the nine months leading up to the conference, members of Federighi's team consulted with Apple's lawyers to make sure they didn't make a mistake.

An Apple spokesman told The Information that Apple puts the same effort into privacy innovation as we put into all of our product designs, and the result is greater choice and superior products for our customers.

The full report from Information details the industry response to ATT and the creation of IDFA.