December 9, 2021
Despite promises to curb any form of tracking, Apple is now digressing from its original position.
The company now allows social media companies to share user-level signals from iPhones as long as that data is anonymized and aggregated, rather than targeting specific user profiles.
According to the companies, Apple explicitly instructed that they “may not derive data from a device to uniquely identify it.” However, they could identify and use group-level data.
Therefore, this position will allow social media companies to tailor ads to a particular trend of behaviour, unlike in the past, when ads were designed to target individual users.
Cory Munchbach, chief operating officer at customer data platform BlueConic, said Apple had faced a lot of criticism with its privacy policy introduced earlier this year.
Also, as Munchbach puts it, “Apple can’t put themselves in a situation where they are gutting their top-performing apps from a user-consumption perspective. That would ultimately hurt iOS.”
For more information, read the original story in Ars Technica.
