Communications of the ACM
Apple's Move to Make Advertising Harder on iOS 14 is Part of a Trend
Starting with iOS 14, which will ship this fall, Apple will begin requiring developers to show you a warning that they are collecting your Identification for Advertisers (IDFA), and youll have to opt in to sharing it. Some large percentage of users can b
Credit: Alex Castro/The Verge
Apple and Facebook are fighting again, and how you feel about it says something about who you trust to represent your interests in the strange tech landscape of 2020.
Start with a rather academic question that may make your eyes glaze over in spite of yourself: When does pro-privacy regulation overstep its bounds to become anticompetitive? It's a question I found myself asking last year, when Apple canceled Facebook's enterprise certificate temporarily following revelations that the company had been using those certificates to conduct market research. And it's a question I'm thinking about today, as Apple intervenes to unilaterally reshape a market — in ways that once again put Facebook on the defensive.
The issue at stake is a technical one, but it's worth learning a little bit about — if only for the fact that, assuming you use an iPhone, it's going to result in a lot of pop-ups on your phone once you upgrade your device in a month or so. The advertising industry assigns a unique code to each device called an Identification for Advertisers, or IDFA. Knowing your IDFA can help advertisers tell whether their ads are effective, particularly when they've shown you the same ad in multiple places. Facebook uses the IDFA as part of Audience Network, its ad network for developers.
Starting with iOS 14, which will ship this fall, Apple will begin requiring that developers show you a warning that they are collecting your IDFA, and you'll have to opt in to sharing it. Some large percentage of users can be expected to say "no thanks."
From The Verge
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