Earlier this week, stories emerged that some China-based advertising groups were creating their own smart workarounds for the new anti-tracking technology that Apple is including in the next versions of iOS 14. Now it looks like Apple is reacting.
On Thursday, the Financial Times reported that apple sent notices to at least two Chinese apps that were caught trying to create their own unique identifiers for a given app – something that the Apple update explicitly prohibits.
The two applications in question were caught using something called a China Advertising Association ID (CAID for short), which was developed by the region eponymous trade association in late 2020 as a way to keep tracking and targeting iPhone users long after Apple’s updates took effect. The Financial Times first broke the news that some of China’s biggest technology companies – such as Baidu, Tencent and Bytedance – were reportedly running tests to implement the identifier. Collectively, these three digital giants are supposed to to control about 54% from China total ad spend.
It is unclear what Apple’s updates will do with the billions of dollars spent. Here in the USAS., we know that some of the top players in the ad serving market – Facebook in particular – have forecast some kind of significant drop in iOS revenue update, and it was in a public relations spree the past few months to defend its core business from the clutches of Apple.
We wrote a little bit about what these updates involve – and why Facebook is on the offensive – in the past, but at the most basic level, the update would simply require applications to request the user consent before using a specific advertising identifier (called an IDFA), which is built into your phone. Without access to IDFA, these application developers do not have the ability to track users outside of their own application, which, as you can imagine, is very bad news for companies that profit doing exactly that. Although some of them tried to find their own covert ways to subvert Apple’s new rules, exist actually some quite strict guidelines banning almost all of them: no “fingerprint,” no hash data, and not create your own identifiers.
G / O Media can receive a commission
It turns out that this is what some of these China-based companies were trying to do. TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, for example, uses an adtech platform called Ocean Engine to aspirate identifiers such as a phone’s IMEI and hardware specifications, which are used to assign a unique CAID to the phone. If you look at the Privacy & Terms for CAID, he notes that this identifier is then designed to be stored on a server hosted within the Advertising Association itself, meaning that any application using the Association’s integrated code could then call that ID back to the market for whom is using your specific application.
If that sounds like a violation of Apple’s strict guidelines here, it is because it really is. But as the initial Financial Times points out, Apple inexplicably has not yet cracked down on CAID, or any applications that implement it. At least so far – according to the Times, a developer who was sneaked in by entering his code was told that Apple found that his app “collects user and device information to create a unique identifier for the user’s device” and had two weeks to update its app so that it “complies with the App Store Review Guidelines within 14 days”.
At the moment, it is unclear whether key players in the mobile app space are going to back down. Although Gizmodo has not been able to confirm that Tencent or Baidu has not yet changed, at the time of this writing, the documents of the Bytedance developer still list CAID as an optional identifier if a user’s IDFA is not available.
We contacted Apple to comment on your application and will be updated if we receive a response.