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iOS 10 to Feature Stronger “Limit Ad Tracking” Control

153 points by cpeterso 10y ago

shostack 10y ago
My expectation is that more and more apps will push for user authentication, at which time they will send some sort of hashed identifier to any number of cookie onboarding services that can then identify the user for ad networks (and pay the game owner a CPM rate based on successfully matched IDs). A large part of the reason Google has been pushing to search while signed in over the past few years has been related to cross-device tracking and attribution. For those that are not familiar with the problem advertisers face here... In short, if someone sees/clicks an ad on one device, and then converts on another, most of the time that tracking is lost unless you have the right tech setup and are passing some sort of unique identifier. This can have the effect of causing mobile or tablet traffic to look like it doesn't perform, just as an example. That in turn impacts budgeting and optimization decisions that could cause an advertiser to shoot themselves in the foot due to reporting limitations. Frequency capping is also important. Advertisers don't want to show more ads than they need to, and without the ability to identify a device, they can't set that limit, so you might see the same ad for the same advertiser nonstop. Not arguing whether more tracking and ads are good or not as everyone has their own opinions there, but the technical challenge from an advertising and analytics standpoint is a tough and interesting one.
- Benjammer 10y ago
  More than just a channel appearing to underperform, you can get misleading information without cross-platform attribution. Many common user behaviors for online shopping consist of browsing/searching on a mobile device, and then converting (buying) on their desktop computer when they get home. This type of behavior is very valuable to know about, but difficult to track properly and may lead you to believe you have little mobile engagement and that your web traffic is killing it with the organic conversions, when really it's totally reversed and your mobile product is the major driver for desktop conversions.
  - themartorana 10y ago
    TV advertisers knew this - called Effective Frequency - the "number of times a person must be exposed to an advertising message before a response is made and before exposure is considered wasteful." Thing is, we try to track every damn thing, when there's still effective audio and visual advertising that, while not necessarily driving a measured online conversion, may still have you reach for a Pepsi over a Coke at a Wawa while getting gas. So where naive advertisers might make such a correlation and believe their organic traffic is spectacular, I would think season advertisers would know an ad campaign's effectiveness isn't always in an immediate and wholly measurable conversion. I could be wrong. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effective_frequency?wprov=sfsi1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effective_frequency?wprov=sfsi...
    - shostack 10y ago
      So I would humbly consider myself a seasoned advertiser. I know there's a major cross-channel and cross-device picture happening. The challenge often comes when needing to report on metrics. Unfortunately, the saying "what gets measured gets managed" cuts both ways. So I can know with all my heart that something is driving latent activity, but if I can't report on it, often times that isn't sufficient because people want to see measurable ROI when it comes to digital media. View-through and assist conversions try to help with this, but then you get into the valuation question of "what is the value of a view-through or assist conversion?" Similarly, "what is the value of a Like?" Ultimately a company needs to build a model to back things out against their targets, and so unless you have solid incremental lift testing data, or other MMM-type data, you're faced with the really hard task of trying to justify this stuff that isn't always showing measurable performance.
  - shostack 10y ago
    Yep, this was what I was getting at. Understanding the role of the device or channel in your path to conversion is absolutely critical for ensuring that you are making intelligent decisions and not misattributing performance to another channel (Direct and Organic being common culprits). There's a surprising number of devils in the analytics details depending on a given site's setup (including things like payment processors showing up as referrals unless you exclude them) that can mess with things. Thankfully a lot of the big ones are "known unknowns" now that you can try to deal with or account for.
erdevs 10y ago
As a user who hasn't yet developed a lot of trust with most adtech companies in the mobile space today, I'm happy to see this. (By not yet developing trust, I mean across several fronts: their security rigor, their concern for end user privacy, their business practices and ethics broadly, etc. Would be happy for companies in the space to prove themselves out on these fronts, but it hasn't happened broadly yet, imo.) This will cause some hacks in the industry, though. We might see a resurgence of device fingerprinting within apps, and it might lead to an increase brand-like advertising vs pure performance marketing. Also, users that have ad tracking enabled might be considered more valuable and unless the practice is banned by AAPL (or maybe it already is), I could see apps that rely on ad revenue to a large degree incentivizing users to enable ad tracking. I wonder if the default setting will be to limit ad tracking or not. I assume not, but this could have a really large impact if it's on by default.
- allendoerfer 10y ago
  >As a user who hasn't yet developed a lot of trust with most adtech companies in the mobile space today, I'm happy to see this. This may sound tinfoily, but we really should not trust anyone. Maybe some banks in some countries handle security reasonably, I think all the rest has just out of pure luck not been hacked yet.
- kiallmacinnes 10y ago
  > I could see apps that rely on ad revenue to a large degree incentivizing users to enable ad tracking. This is exactly what I thought of when I saw the all zeros ID. Make it random per device app install, and apps can't say "Want to see this awesome cat video? Enable ad tracking first".
  - BillinghamJ 10y ago
    Apps can't say that. Doing so would get them kicked off the developer program - quite possibly permanently.
    - tehwebguy 10y ago
kylec 10y ago
Beginning in iOS 10, when a user enables “Limit Ad Tracking,” the OS will send along the advertising identifier with a new value of “00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000.” I think it would be better if iOS just generated a new, random ID every time. If the app knows that the user has disabled ad tracking, it could change the behavior or prevent the user from using it until tracking is turned back on.
- comex 10y ago
  The latter at least would lead to App Store rejection.
  - Benjammer 10y ago
    And the former would probably lead to your bundle ID being banned from the app store if they catch you doing something shady like that. Every time you submit an update to the app store for review you have to check a box that says that you acknowledge that you are using the advertising identifier in some capacity in your app, and another that says that you are faithfully abiding by the user's "limit tracking" iOS setting. If they catch you lying about these things they say they will remove and ban your app (no future updates either) from the store.
    - mikeash 10y ago
      Will Apple enforce it? That sounds like a lot of work for them to check. Apple is really strict about some rules, but others they just don't care. Push notification spam, for example, is a constant problem even though it's against the rules.
      - LeoNatan25 10y ago
        Even if they don't catch bad developers at the time of submission, once users start complaining, that will trigger an investigation and the developer will eventually be caught.
pmedwards25 10y ago
I am deeply disappointed, but ultimately not surprised, at the lengths advertising companies will go to to make a dollar more. The "choices" the typical consumer has if they want to make themselves somewhat anonymous to advertisers are frankly awful. At the moment the only kind of official controls are very limited and not respected or even fully functional with all companies. The self regulation of the industry is appalling and should be replaced with an international committee of advertising that finds a balance between people's privacy and the right of advertising companies and developers to make money. At the moment, this three way relationship is skewed very heavily towards the advertising companies, meaning the two people who are really the most important - the consumer and the developer - are getting a rotten deal. Oh, capitalism, how I love you.
dmerrick 10y ago
I'm really happy to see a company so large taking a stand on privacy. Even if most of their users are unsavvy and don't understand/care about the implications, Apple is making an example that other companies can now follow.
- taftster 10y ago
  Right, I agree. I honestly don't know the track record of Apple and user privacy rights and I am probably in the unsavvy and don't understand category. But just casually compared to the wild-wild-west of the Android platform, I am very happy to continue to support the Apple ecosystem; even if this means I have a bit of the vendor lock-in that goes with it.
- askafriend 10y ago
  This type of stance alone is worth the extra cost of an iPhone or Mac over their less expensive competition (at least to me). I can buy Apple products with confidence.
- josho 10y ago
  Agreed, but this is also classic business strategy (think Sun Tzu's Art of War--Attack where your enemy is weak). Specifically, Google and Apple are competitors in the mobile space. Apple is creating a product differentiator by including strong privacy controls. Google as an advertising company risks its revenue base if it were to include string privacy controls. So, it's smart business by Apple to compete in an area where their competitor cannot. A good lesson for startups to reflect on.
0xCMP 10y ago
I was under the impression that thats what it always did... A flag?! What kind of insanity is that?
- lazi 10y ago
  It was a flag (before iOS10) which the developers were obliged to honour if they were doing more things than just frequency counting for example. Most of them probably didn't, and that's why Apple decided to take this step..
red_admiral 10y ago
It would be far more useful to have a feature akin to how FIDO authentication works where the app sees something like Hash(userID, appName). That way you can track a user within an app, so if you install the same app on your iPhone and iPad you don't have to make a separate username/password combination to get access to your saved data. But you can't track people across different apps.

153 points by cpeterso 10y ago

My expectation is that more and more apps will push for user authentication, at which time they will send some sort of hashed identifier to any number of cookie onboarding services that can then identify the user for ad networks (and pay the game owner a CPM rate based on successfully matched IDs). A large part of the reason Google has been pushing to search while signed in over the past few years has been related to cross-device tracking and attribution. For those that are not familiar with the problem advertisers face here... In short, if someone sees/clicks an ad on one device, and then converts on another, most of the time that tracking is lost unless you have the right tech setup and are passing some sort of unique identifier. This can have the effect of causing mobile or tablet traffic to look like it doesn't perform, just as an example. That in turn impacts budgeting and optimization decisions that could cause an advertiser to shoot themselves in the foot due to reporting limitations. Frequency capping is also important. Advertisers don't want to show more ads than they need to, and without the ability to identify a device, they can't set that limit, so you might see the same ad for the same advertiser nonstop. Not arguing whether more tracking and ads are good or not as everyone has their own opinions there, but the technical challenge from an advertising and analytics standpoint is a tough and interesting one.

Benjammer 10y ago
More than just a channel appearing to underperform, you can get misleading information without cross-platform attribution. Many common user behaviors for online shopping consist of browsing/searching on a mobile device, and then converting (buying) on their desktop computer when they get home. This type of behavior is very valuable to know about, but difficult to track properly and may lead you to believe you have little mobile engagement and that your web traffic is killing it with the organic conversions, when really it's totally reversed and your mobile product is the major driver for desktop conversions.
- themartorana 10y ago
  TV advertisers knew this - called Effective Frequency - the "number of times a person must be exposed to an advertising message before a response is made and before exposure is considered wasteful." Thing is, we try to track every damn thing, when there's still effective audio and visual advertising that, while not necessarily driving a measured online conversion, may still have you reach for a Pepsi over a Coke at a Wawa while getting gas. So where naive advertisers might make such a correlation and believe their organic traffic is spectacular, I would think season advertisers would know an ad campaign's effectiveness isn't always in an immediate and wholly measurable conversion. I could be wrong. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effective_frequency?wprov=sfsi1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effective_frequency?wprov=sfsi...
  - shostack 10y ago
    So I would humbly consider myself a seasoned advertiser. I know there's a major cross-channel and cross-device picture happening. The challenge often comes when needing to report on metrics. Unfortunately, the saying "what gets measured gets managed" cuts both ways. So I can know with all my heart that something is driving latent activity, but if I can't report on it, often times that isn't sufficient because people want to see measurable ROI when it comes to digital media. View-through and assist conversions try to help with this, but then you get into the valuation question of "what is the value of a view-through or assist conversion?" Similarly, "what is the value of a Like?" Ultimately a company needs to build a model to back things out against their targets, and so unless you have solid incremental lift testing data, or other MMM-type data, you're faced with the really hard task of trying to justify this stuff that isn't always showing measurable performance.
- shostack 10y ago
  Yep, this was what I was getting at. Understanding the role of the device or channel in your path to conversion is absolutely critical for ensuring that you are making intelligent decisions and not misattributing performance to another channel (Direct and Organic being common culprits). There's a surprising number of devils in the analytics details depending on a given site's setup (including things like payment processors showing up as referrals unless you exclude them) that can mess with things. Thankfully a lot of the big ones are "known unknowns" now that you can try to deal with or account for.

erdevs 10y ago

As a user who hasn't yet developed a lot of trust with most adtech companies in the mobile space today, I'm happy to see this. (By not yet developing trust, I mean across several fronts: their security rigor, their concern for end user privacy, their business practices and ethics broadly, etc. Would be happy for companies in the space to prove themselves out on these fronts, but it hasn't happened broadly yet, imo.) This will cause some hacks in the industry, though. We might see a resurgence of device fingerprinting within apps, and it might lead to an increase brand-like advertising vs pure performance marketing. Also, users that have ad tracking enabled might be considered more valuable and unless the practice is banned by AAPL (or maybe it already is), I could see apps that rely on ad revenue to a large degree incentivizing users to enable ad tracking. I wonder if the default setting will be to limit ad tracking or not. I assume not, but this could have a really large impact if it's on by default.

allendoerfer 10y ago
>As a user who hasn't yet developed a lot of trust with most adtech companies in the mobile space today, I'm happy to see this. This may sound tinfoily, but we really should not trust anyone. Maybe some banks in some countries handle security reasonably, I think all the rest has just out of pure luck not been hacked yet.
kiallmacinnes 10y ago
> I could see apps that rely on ad revenue to a large degree incentivizing users to enable ad tracking. This is exactly what I thought of when I saw the all zeros ID. Make it random per device app install, and apps can't say "Want to see this awesome cat video? Enable ad tracking first".
- BillinghamJ 10y ago
  Apps can't say that. Doing so would get them kicked off the developer program - quite possibly permanently.
  - tehwebguy 10y ago

kylec 10y ago

Beginning in iOS 10, when a user enables “Limit Ad Tracking,” the OS will send along the advertising identifier with a new value of “00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000.” I think it would be better if iOS just generated a new, random ID every time. If the app knows that the user has disabled ad tracking, it could change the behavior or prevent the user from using it until tracking is turned back on.

comex 10y ago
The latter at least would lead to App Store rejection.
- Benjammer 10y ago
  And the former would probably lead to your bundle ID being banned from the app store if they catch you doing something shady like that. Every time you submit an update to the app store for review you have to check a box that says that you acknowledge that you are using the advertising identifier in some capacity in your app, and another that says that you are faithfully abiding by the user's "limit tracking" iOS setting. If they catch you lying about these things they say they will remove and ban your app (no future updates either) from the store.
  - mikeash 10y ago
    Will Apple enforce it? That sounds like a lot of work for them to check. Apple is really strict about some rules, but others they just don't care. Push notification spam, for example, is a constant problem even though it's against the rules.
    - LeoNatan25 10y ago
      Even if they don't catch bad developers at the time of submission, once users start complaining, that will trigger an investigation and the developer will eventually be caught.

pmedwards25 10y ago

I am deeply disappointed, but ultimately not surprised, at the lengths advertising companies will go to to make a dollar more. The "choices" the typical consumer has if they want to make themselves somewhat anonymous to advertisers are frankly awful. At the moment the only kind of official controls are very limited and not respected or even fully functional with all companies. The self regulation of the industry is appalling and should be replaced with an international committee of advertising that finds a balance between people's privacy and the right of advertising companies and developers to make money. At the moment, this three way relationship is skewed very heavily towards the advertising companies, meaning the two people who are really the most important - the consumer and the developer - are getting a rotten deal. Oh, capitalism, how I love you.

dmerrick 10y ago

I'm really happy to see a company so large taking a stand on privacy. Even if most of their users are unsavvy and don't understand/care about the implications, Apple is making an example that other companies can now follow.

taftster 10y ago
Right, I agree. I honestly don't know the track record of Apple and user privacy rights and I am probably in the unsavvy and don't understand category. But just casually compared to the wild-wild-west of the Android platform, I am very happy to continue to support the Apple ecosystem; even if this means I have a bit of the vendor lock-in that goes with it.
askafriend 10y ago
This type of stance alone is worth the extra cost of an iPhone or Mac over their less expensive competition (at least to me). I can buy Apple products with confidence.
josho 10y ago
Agreed, but this is also classic business strategy (think Sun Tzu's Art of War--Attack where your enemy is weak). Specifically, Google and Apple are competitors in the mobile space. Apple is creating a product differentiator by including strong privacy controls. Google as an advertising company risks its revenue base if it were to include string privacy controls. So, it's smart business by Apple to compete in an area where their competitor cannot. A good lesson for startups to reflect on.

0xCMP 10y ago

I was under the impression that thats what it always did... A flag?! What kind of insanity is that?

lazi 10y ago
It was a flag (before iOS10) which the developers were obliged to honour if they were doing more things than just frequency counting for example. Most of them probably didn't, and that's why Apple decided to take this step..

red_admiral 10y ago

It would be far more useful to have a feature akin to how FIDO authentication works where the app sees something like Hash(userID, appName). That way you can track a user within an app, so if you install the same app on your iPhone and iPad you don't have to make a separate username/password combination to get access to your saved data. But you can't track people across different apps.