Of all the preservation of privacy goodies that Apple promised to include in the iOS 14 update, the so-called “Tracking transparency”The alerts were probably the most controversial, provoking enough resistance from tech giant Facebook that the feature is over being late past your original anutumn deadline.
Now it looks like Apple has waited long enough. A user with beta access to the next shared iOS 14.4 update a screenshot on a MacRumors forum showing the official NBA app asking you to track your activity on non-NBA apps and websites. In the customizable fine print that accompanies these tracking requests, the NBA app notes that it will use this data to provide “a better, personalized ad experience” – whatever that means.
According to MacRumors, it also appears that some people using older versions of iOS 14 have also started to receive these alerts on specific applications, albeit in a “very inconsistent” way.
To recap briefly, the idea of the so-called “AppTrackingTransparency Structure”—Or just ATT for short — is giving users control over the amount of data that applications on their phones are allowed to absorb. Arguably, the most interesting data that users are having control over with the update would be their phone’s advertising identifier, or IDFA. We cover the IDFA in depth before, but in a nutshell, it is a string of characters that identifies your specific phone in all the applications you use. Being able to access this specific ID not only allows advertisers to track you from app to app, but in tonnes of From others ways too.
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Of course, most advertisers were a little angry with the idea that Apple would be stealing its data supply. And the face of that angry party, ironically, was Facebook. We have mentioned before that outside of Instagram, WhatsApp and its main blue app, Facebook also has an external “ad network” that extracts information from the consumer’s phone through non-Facebook apps to allow users of those apps to be redirected for the countless Facebook platforms. Losing access to IDFA, in particular, means that this Ad Network is losing a ton of valuable consumer data, which means that Facebook, in turn, is losing advertising dollars that were historically used to target that data .
That said, I think we can all agree that, when it comes to companies, Facebook not really the nicest player. This is probably why his tactics in the past few months have clumsily told us that updating ATT has the potential to harm small businesses that rely on their ad platform for day-to-day work. Since August, we have seen this message launched in press callscorporate blog postsand – last week – two full-page newspaper ads.
Facebook, on the other hand, is kind of confused in how small businesses will be affected (in addition to some vague definition of evil). Now that there are real details about what ATT involves, it seems that even Facebook advertisers themselves are not too concerned about the real impact that is falling at the peak.
According to MacRumors, update 14.4 is expected to be released publicly in January or February 2021. It looks like Facebook – and the rest of us – will see these impacts soon.