With the launch of iOS 14.5, Apple has made changes to its Identifier for Advertisers (IDFA), introducing the App Tracking Transparency (ATT) framework and transforming the digital advertising landscape on iOS devices. And, on Google’s Chrome, we still have the ‘death of the cookie’ to look forward to. A pair of industry changes that have been widely seen as being ‘anti-competitive’. Both instances further restrict the free flow of data that powers much of modern advertising, but do so unilaterally without truly providing consumers with sufficient transparency or choice with their data. Recent Blis research found that 78% of senior marketers are concerned or very concerned about the loss of cookies, while 61% feel the same about the reduction of IDFAs.
Industry sea change
While it’s good to see Apple and Google avoiding the pitfalls of simply trading one personal identifier for another, there are doubts over whether the pair will genuinely ‘walk the walk’ when it comes to privacy, as well as ‘talk the talk’. What you can say about the changes is that, while they hurt everybody a little bit, they hurt everybody other than Apple and Google a lot more. As it stands, both of them are going to come out of this further ahead of the rest, so the industry is looking at the pair to hold themselves to the same standard that they’re trying to hold everyone else to. Apple’s ATT framework requires publishers to gain permission from consumers to collect their app data for tracking. However, Apple has handed itself permission to serve targeted ads by default – and it’s something the company is currently facing an antitrust complaint about in France. Equally, alongside scrapping cookies, Google has said it will not support universal or alternative IDs in its tech stack, but the Google identifier is itself a universal or alternative identifier, because we all use Google. So, what we’re likely to see with Google is the use of their cross-site ID that connects what you’ve done on the search space to how you end up landing on a particular publisher. Now, we don’t entirely agree that universal IDs are the long-term way forward either, and these IDs are just one solution among many. What we believe many universal ID providers have done is to say: ‘okay, if we can’t use cookies, we’ll take your email and turn it into an identifier instead’. Of course, they will hash it, turn it into a number, make it anonymous but, effectively, when you log in to a website they’re turning that into an ID. This could cause issues for consumers because, in the past, their ID was just a cookie that they could clear from within Chrome. Some are finding the ability to opt-out of some of these universal IDs to be much more opaque and difficult. This isn’t the direction consumers or regulators have said they want to go and it feels like part of an ongoing arms race, but with personal data as the ammunition. We believe the way forward is for the industry to focus on finding a better road to take, such as privacy-first technology that’s not based on consumer login credentials, identity fingerprints, 3rd-party-cookies-pretending-to-be-1st-party cookies, or any of the workarounds currently being floated. So, what’s the solution?
