Apple declined to answer specific questions for this article but described privacy as its North Star, implying it was setting a general destination rather than defining a narrow pathway for developers.Ĭory Munchbach, chief operating officer at customer data platform BlueConic, said Apple had to stand back from a strict reading of its rules because the disruption to the mobile ads ecosystem would be too great. It is not clear whether Apple has actually blessed these solutions. “The market changed their minds in a radical way,” he said. Oren Kaniel, the chief executive of AppsFlyer, a mobile attribution platform that works with app developers, said that when his company introduced such a “privacy-centric” tool based on aggregated measurement in July 2020, “the level of pushback that we received from the entire ecosystem was huge.” Advertisementīut now such aggregated solutions are the default for 95 percent of his clients. This type of tracking is becoming the norm. These companies point out that Apple has told developers they “may not derive data from a device for the purpose of uniquely identifying it.” This means they can observe “signals” from an iPhone at a group level, enabling ads that can still be tailored to “cohorts” aligning with certain behavior but not associated with unique IDs. Similarly, Facebook operations chief Sheryl Sandberg said the social media group was engaged in a “multiyear effort” to rebuild ad infrastructure “using more aggregate or anonymized data”. Any personally identifiable data will first be obfuscated and aggregated. Apple’s message to potential customers was clear-if you choose an iPhone, you are choosing privacy.īut seven months later, companies including Snap and Facebook have been allowed to keep sharing user-level signals from iPhones, as long as that data is anonymised and aggregated rather than tied to specific user profiles.įor instance Snap has told investors that it plans to share data from its 306 million users-including those who ask Snap “not to track”-so advertisers can gain “a more complete, real-time view” on how ad campaigns are working. When his iPhone prompted him to “Ask App Not to Track,” he clicked it and they vanished. In May Apple communicated its privacy changes to the wider public, launching an advert that featured a harassed man whose daily activities were closely monitored by an ever-growing group of strangers.

Apple has allowed app developers to collect data from its 1 billion iPhone users for targeted advertising, in an unacknowledged shift that lets companies follow a much looser interpretation of its controversial privacy policy.

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