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On Wednesday, Apple informed a new channel that the long-awaited privacy update to Apple’s iPhone and iPad operating systems will dramatically hurt mobile advertising in this coming ‘early spring’.
Well, to target mobile ads and check how effective they are, app developers and other industry players are now using Apple’s (IDFA) or a string of letters and numbers that’s different on every Apple device. As soon as this update rolls out, app makers will be forced to ask permission to access a user’s IDFA through a prompt. There is a significant portion of users who are expected to say no by reducing the effectiveness of targeted ads.
In the last summer, apple first announced the change which giving advertisers and app makers ample time to prepare. Further, it becomes a major point of contention for ad-supported companies who lost revenue from the change.
Facebook is particularly arguing that the change might hurt the availability of free content on the open web and the ability of a small business to place personalized ads. On Wednesday, CEO Mark Zuckerberg slammed the change, calling Apple as one of its biggest competitors and claiming that the change “threatens the personalized ads that millions of small businesses rely on to find and reach customers.”
In the mobile industry, the timing of Apple’s change has been the subject of intense speculations. On Thursday, Apple CEO Tim Cook is set to speak about data privacy at the Computers, Privacy, and Data Protection conference in Brussels. On Thursday, the company will also release new marketing materials which include an update to its website and a report on data usage to illustrate how the companies are track user data across websites and apps.
Apple informed a news channel that the next beta versions of iOS will require app developers to ask permission to access the phone’s unique identifier.
The current version of iOS is 14.4, which was released earlier this week. Currently, there isn’t a public beta version beyond that available to developers. Moreover, declined to provide additional timing details.
Companies are preparing for the change, they are allowing partners and advertisers to know how they plan to approach the change. On Wednesday, Google in a post mentioned that it will no longer use any information that falls under Apple’s AppTracking Transparency framework for its iOS apps, and doesn’t plan to show the prompt on those apps.
