Apple decided to postpone app privacy questions in iOS 14

IDFA or Identifier for Advertisers is a privacy protection system introduced by Apple in the early years. In theory, this can help protect privacy by restricting advertising identifiers.

By default, Apple does not restrict the use of advertising identifiers, so advertising networks can track specific users to push personalized ads based on advertising identifiers.

When the user manually removes the advertising identifier, it is equivalent to changing the identity. At this time, the advertising network needs to re-track and collect user data to determine the user’s interests.

However, in the iOS 14 system, Apple decided to improve its function. Apple plans to pop up a window to ask the user whether to allow tracking when the app reads the advertising identifier.

Although it seems that whether a pop-up asking about user tracking seems to have little effect, in fact, this move will indeed cause a devastating blow to advertising networks.

Prohibiting apps from reading IDFA means that these apps and their built-in advertising SDKs cannot identify users, so the inability to recommend personalized ads will reduce click-through rates, etc.

Facebook, one of the world’s largest advertising networks, recently released a blog post saying that after testing the privacy features of iOS 14 it will cause its advertising revenue to plummet by more than 50%.

For this type of advertising network, this will cause a devastating blow, so some major advertising networks have jointly sent a letter to Apple hoping to adjust this option.

Apple issued a statement saying that the improvement of the advertising identifier function is actually a privacy improvement, and the core purpose is to protect the security and privacy of users, etc.

The company said that this is not specifically aimed at the advertising industry but to protect user privacy. Apple is relatively better than other companies in the field of privacy protection.

But even so, Apple seems to have chosen to compromise. In the latest statement, Apple stated that it will postpone the pop-up query feature for advertising identifiers until the beginning of next year.

Apple said it will give developers more transition time to adapt to the upcoming new policy, and Apple will still launch this feature starting early next year.

Via: TechCrunch