Some “quiet” news came out this morning that impacts the mobile ad industry.
It involves Apple and its privacy policy – “Do Not Track”.
The headline is that Apple has allowed some major developers to collect and keep user-level signals from iPhones for purposes of targeted advertising.
There’s some nuance here, though.
For the companies who have been allowed to do this, or who chosen to – for instance, Snap, Meta and AppsFlyer – the data has to be anonymized and aggregated and not tied to specific user profiles.
The official line given to developers is that 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 behaviour but not associated with unique IDs.
This type of measurement, and aggregate tracking, will become the norm if it’s not abused or altered.
Obviously, it seems there’s a crack in the door to a “strict” reading of Apple’s previously stated rules.
When that happens, we as an industry have to make sure we do not overstep these boundaries. Privacy is Apple’s “North Star”, as they’ve put it, and so it’s incumbent on all of us in mobile advertising to play by the rules and not take too much leeway given about tracking & measurement.