Apple’s Privacy Advancements Continue to Concern Advertisers

Apple has made it very clear that the privacy of its users is of paramount importance, and this has thrown advertisers and marketing agencies into a real frenzy. The latest security feature that Apple is putting out is called the iCloud Private Relay, and what it basically does is that it prevents users from being tracked while they are surfing the web. Apple is rolling this out as part of their premium iCloud package called iCloud+, and the basis of this is that there will be lots of new security features that subscribers can take advantage of.

While this is definitely going to help address a lot of concerns that consumers have surrounding these types of things, advertisers are quite concerned about it. Because of the fact that this is the sort of thing that could potentially end up acting as a type of VPN that masks user IPs and the like, advertisers would no longer get the chance to fingerprint users.

Fingerprinting is the process by which advertisers monitor the activity of various users online in order to build a profile on them. This makes it so that they can show targeted ads to these users that will pertain to their interests, but if they can’t access the IP address of these users fingerprinting will end up becoming more or less impossible for them.

This is coming after the rollout of App Tracking Transparency ended up turning off app tracking by default, thereby forcing apps to try to entice users into opting into tracking in order to receive more personalized ads. Most users are not opting into this for obvious reasons, and this next step is probably going to cause an even greater amount of havoc in the ad industry since it will take away another tool that these companies have at their disposal all in all.


H/T: DD.

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