Apple reaches quiet truce over iPhone privacy changes

Apple has allowed app developers to collect data from 1 billion iPhone users for targeted ads, which, without recognizing, allows companies to take a much looser interpretation of its controversial privacy policy.

In May, Apple announced its privacy changes to the general public by running an ad that depicted a jaded man whose daily activities were closely watched by an ever-growing group of strangers. When his iPhone prompted him to “Ask app not to track”, he clicked on it and they disappeared. Apple’s message to potential customers was clear: if you choose an iPhone, you choose privacy.

But seven months later, companies including Snap and Facebook were allowed to continue to exchange user-level signals from the iPhone as long as the data was anonymized and aggregated rather than tied to specific user profiles.

For example, Snap told investors it plans to share data from its 306 million users, including those who ask Snap to “do not track”so advertisers can get a “better real-time view”of how ad campaigns are performing. Any personally identifiable data will first be obfuscated and aggregated.

Similarly, Facebook’s chief of operations Sheryl Sandberg said the social media group has been making a “year-old effort”to rebuild its advertising infrastructure “using more aggregated or anonymized data.”

The companies note that Apple has told developers that they “cannot obtain data from a device to uniquely identify it.”This means they can observe group-level “cues”from the iPhone, allowing them to target ads that can still be tailored to “cohorts”that are consistent with certain behaviors but not associated with unique identifiers.

This type of tracking is becoming the norm. Oren Kaniel, CEO of AppsFlyer, a mobile attribution platform that works with app developers, said that when his company introduced such a “privacy-focused”tool based on aggregated measurements in July 2020, “the level of resistance we got from the whole ecosystem was huge.”

But now such aggregated solutions are used by default for 95 percent of its customers. “The market has radically changed its mind,” he said.

It’s unclear if Apple actually blessed these decisions. Apple declined to answer specific questions for this article, but described privacy as its polar star, implying that it establishes a general destination rather than defining a narrow path for developers.

Corey Munkbach, chief operating officer of customer data platform BlueConic, said Apple had to drop a strict reading of its rules because the disruption to the mobile advertising ecosystem would be too great.

“Apple can’t put themselves in a situation where they essentially gut their top-performing apps in terms of user consumption,”she said. “It will eventually break iOS.”

For those who strictly interpret Apple’s policies, these solutions violate the privacy rules set for iOS users.

The Lockdown Privacy app, which blocks ad trackers, called Apple’s policy “functionally useless for stopping third-party tracking.”He ran a lot of tests on top apps and found that personal data and device information is still “in almost all cases sent to trackers.”

But companies that collect user-level data have said that apps continue to “leak”information such as a user’s IP address and location simply because some require such information to function. Advertisers need to know certain things, such as the user’s language or device screen size, otherwise the app experience will be terrible.

The risk is that by allowing user-level data to be used by non-transparent third parties as long as they promise not to abuse it, Apple is effectively trusting the same groups that CEO Tim Cook called “hucksters who just want to make a quick buck.”

Companies will promise that they will only review user-level data after it has been anonymized, Munkbach said, but without access to the data or algorithms working behind the scenes, users will not know if their data has been kept private.

“If the historical precedent in ad tech is relevant, these black boxes hide a lot of sins,” she said. “There is reason to believe that this leaves much to be desired.”