Home » Apple: “You can do digital advertising without violating the confidentiality of personal data”

Apple: “You can do digital advertising without violating the confidentiality of personal data”

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After a long development phase, Apple released the public version of iOS 14.5 this week. It is an important and substantial update, which implements various innovations for the interface, for the system apps and for the developers. Among these there is one that could go almost unnoticed by the general public, but which is actually the most important of all: the introduction of the so-called App Tracking Transparency (ATT), the latest in a series of important privacy features. announced by Apple at WWDC in June 2020.

“With App Tracking Transparency, users will be able to choose whether or not to give applications the possibility to collect the data necessary to track their activities on apps and sites,” explained Erik Neuenschwander, Apple’s Chief Privacy Engineer, in an exclusive interview. with La Stampa. Since 2011, the founding year of Apple’s privacy engineering team, Neuenschwander’s role has been to oversee the integration of privacy solutions into iPhone, iPad, Mac and all other Apple device software.

Apps ask for permission (with a pop-up)
Users will notice the news mainly due to the presence of a new pop-up, similar to the one for the activation of geolocation or for access to the address book, with which the apps will ask for permission to record personal data for advertising profiling purposes. . The pop-up will appear only if users, in the privacy options, have not completely disabled the possibility of showing it, blocking the profiling request in advance. However, this option and the dialog box are only one of the elements of the ATT, which from the point of view of the developers represents a complex infrastructural change.

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From a technical point of view, the consent provided by the user allows developers to read the so-called “IDFA” (Identifier For Advertising), a unique code that identifies the device – without connecting it to the owner – and allows to track its activities. . Starting from iOS 14.5, if the user has not expressly allowed profiling, the apps receive a “null” IDFA, which, unless substantial changes to the structure of the application, could cause operating problems.

“The reason ATT has only just arrived now after the June 2020 announcement is that we listened to the needs of the developers at length and gave everyone time to change the app structure,” says Neuenschwander. “In the meantime, we have continued to offer other technologies, such as Private Click Measurement (PCM – new feature already included in 2019 on Safari, ed) and SKADNetwork, which allow us to measure the effectiveness of advertisements while respecting user privacy”.

Facebook’s fears
The question of detecting the effectiveness of “ads” is of fundamental importance, and it is the great “unspoken” that lies behind the marketing campaign with which Facebook has tried in every way to discredit and oppose the introduction of ATT on iOS 14.5. According to Zuckerberg, the App Tracking Transparency will make it difficult for small businesses that rely on targeted advertising to make their products and services known.

The reality is as always more complex than that indicated by the marketing narrative. What ATT prevents is not so much tracking (which is accessible upon request for permission), but the possibility of assigning the sale of a product more precisely to the previous display of an advertisement on one of the social platforms owned by Facebook. SDKANetwork and PCM allow you to do the same but in a deliberately less precise and invasive way, thus nullifying the competitive advantage of Facebook in the market for the sale of digital advertising space.

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Apple: unjustified concerns
“Developers are free to manage how they want the timing of displaying the tracking access pop-up,” explains Neuenschwander. “They are also encouraged to provide context in their application before activating it, clearly explaining to users why the app will ask them to access the tracking data. Added to this is a custom description that the app can show directly in the dialog box ».

Furthermore, according to Apple’s Chief Privacy Engineer, the concern with which the digital advertising sector has welcomed ATT is largely unfounded. “When we introduced Intelligent Tracking Prevention on Safari in 2017 (a system that prevents cross-profiling on websites, ed) some argued that that innovation would destroy the online advertising market, that Apple users would lose any value for advertisers. , and so on. None of this has happened: the market has continued to grow, while users who use Safari have been able to preserve their privacy ».

Advertising and privacy can coexist
And this is, for the Apple executive, the most important aspect of all: digital advertising and data privacy are not necessarily on a collision course. “We generally believe that state-of-the-art functionality can be provided while respecting user privacy. This also applies to advertising, ”concludes Neuenschwander. “For us, advertising is an important part of the mobile ecosystem, and it’s critical that developers have the ability to use it to monetize their apps. However, we are convinced that it can be done with adequate tools, which on the one hand respect the privacy of users and on the other contribute to the growth of the app ecosystem “.

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