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Apple’s recent App Store privacy updates
Apple, you may have noticed, cares about your privacy. This fact has got plenty of attention in recent times, not least because the company has brought it up at almost every possible opportunity. In reality though, it’s always been one of its key principles. Speaking at a conference in 2010, Steve Jobs declared, “we take privacy extremely seriously,” giving the example of Apple’s concerns about location tracking, and the potential stalking risk that could pose. To counter this, Apple forced apps to put up an alert to let users know what was happening.
In the more than a decade that has passed since, Apple has continued to make significant privacy updates and interventions. Not surprisingly, many of these centre around apps and the App Store. Two major changes over the last year really caught people’s attention – privacy ‘nutrition labels’ for apps and App Tracking Transparency. The latter is more significant, and more controversial, so let’s start there…
Just what is it?
Put simply, App Tracking Transparency means that users must give their explicit permission to all apps that wish to use the Identifier for Advertisers (IDFA)
– a unique identifier assigned to each iOS device that helps create a profile of a user. Such data can be used for displaying targeted adverts, sharing location data or email addresses with data brokers, or using third-party tools to combine one app with another to target adverts and measure their efficiency, among other things.
From iOS 14.5, iPadOS 14.5 and tvOS 14.5 onwards, as soon as you load an app for the first time, you are asked whether or not you want it “to track your activity across other companies’ apps and websites”.
Unlike with websites, there’s no fiddling around with different settings. The options offered are simply ‘Ask App not to Track’ and ‘Allow’. Tapping ‘Ask App not to Track’ means that it no longer follows a device’s IDFA and cannot link what you do in that app with other activity.
App Tracking Transparency is meant to put the power into your hands. If developers fail to implement it, they could see their apps booted out the App Store. The guidelines from Apple are very clear: “You must receive explicit permission from users via the App Tracking Transparency APIs to track their activity.”
App Tracking Transparency was announced in January 2021 and unveiled to developers in the next beta software release. Apple accompanied the announcement of its imminent arrival with a video explaining it all and an eye-opening document called
‘A Day in the Life of Your Data’ showing just how fundamental the data that could be collected is to building a profile of us all. It included another quote from Steve Jobs:
“I believe people are smart and some people want to share more data than other people do. Ask them. Ask them every time. Make them tell you to stop asking them if they get tired of your asking them. Let them know precisely what you’re going to do with their data.”
This really sums up what App Tracking Transparency is all about.
Why is it controversial?
On the face of it, giving you more control over your data would seem to be a good thing. However, some companies, Facebook in particular, objected to its introduction.
Facebook generates huge amounts of its revenue via advertising – more than US$84 billion in 2020. It feared that if enough people turned off tracking this would make targeting more difficult and less valuable to advertisers. Facebook took out adverts in major American newspapers telling readers that “without personalised ads, Facebook data shows that the average small business advertiser stands to see a cut of over 60% in their sales for every dollar they spend.”
Facebook itself can cope with App Tracking Transparency, it seems. In March, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that the company would “be in a good position,” when the change was introduced, and so it proved. Facebook’s revenue was up 56% year-over-year in the results reported for the second quarter of 2021.
Is it working?
Given that it has only been fully available for a few months, it is probably still too early to tell what the full impact is. The Wall Street Journal reported that ad-measurement firm Branch
Metrics found that fewer than 33% of iOS users are allowing apps to track them, while 67% are not. Furthermore, it reported that ad-measurement firm Tenjin found that advertising spend on iOS had fallen by about a third from 1 June, 2021 to 1 July, 2021, while advertising spend on Android was up 10% in the same time period. It will be worth watching to see if such trends, both in terms of user take-up and ad spend, continue.
Nutrition labels
At the start of this year Apple also introduced app privacy ‘nutrition’ labels, to give you more information and more choice. Every app in the App Store has a label on it explaining what details are being collected and how they are linked to you. Tapping these labels gives you more in-depth information too. As Craig Federighi, Apple’s senior vice president of software engineering, explained at the time:
“Our goal is to create technology that keeps people’s information safe and protected. We believe privacy is a fundamental human right, and our teams work every day to embed it in everything we make.”
There was some dispute early on about the usefulness of these labels. Washington Post journalist Geoffrey A Fowler found that some apps claiming not to share user data were in fact passing it on to Facebook and others. The small print of the labels state: “This information has not been verified by Apple.”
It’s easy to be cynical about Apple’s privacy drive. The company generates a huge amount of money through the App Store and needs to keep justifying why developers can only distribute iPhone software through it (while Apple takes a 30% cut), and how this benefits you. There is no doubt though that user privacy is of fundamental importance to Apple customers, and the changes implemented in 2021 underline that.