Despite promises to curb any form of tracking, Apple is now digressing from its original position.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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.”<\/p>\n\n\n