If we had a choice, would any of us want to be tracked
online for the sake of seeing more relevant digital ads?
We are about to find out.
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On Monday,
Apple released iOS 14.5, one of its most
anticipated software updates for iPhones and iPads in years. It includes
App Tracking Transparency, a new privacy tool that could give us more control over
how our data is shared.
Here is how it works: When an app wants to follow our
activities to share information with third parties such as advertisers, a
window will appear on our Apple device to ask for our permission to do so. If
we say no, the app must stop monitoring and sharing our data.
A pop-up window may sound like a minor design tweak, but it
has thrown the online advertising industry into upheaval. Most notably,
Facebook has gone on the warpath. Last year, the social network created a
website and took out full-page ads in newspapers denouncing Apple’s privacy
feature as harmful to small businesses.
A big motivator, of course, was that the privacy setting
could hurt Facebook’s own business. If we choose not to let Facebook track us,
it will be harder for the company to see what we are shopping for or doing
inside other apps, which will make it more difficult for brands to target us
with ads. (Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has disputed that his company’s
business will be hurt by Apple’s policy.)
“This is a huge step in the right direction, if only because
it’s making Facebook sweat,” said Gennie Gebhart, a director at the Electronic
Frontier Foundation, a digital-rights nonprofit.
But, she added, “One big question is: Will it work?”
Here’s what you need to know about Apple’s new software.
Don’t Track Me (Please)
It’s important to understand how tracking works inside apps.
Let’s say you use a shopping app to browse for a blender.
You look at a blender from Brand X, then close the app. Later, ads for that
blender start showing up in other mobile apps, such as Facebook and Instagram.
Here’s what happened: The shopping app hired an ad-tech
company that embedded trackers inside the app. Those trackers looked at
information on your device to pinpoint you. When you opened other apps working
with the same ad-tech firm, those apps were able to identify you and serve you
ads for Brand X’s blender.
Apple’s new privacy feature is intended to let you decide
whether you want that to happen. Now, when you open some apps, you will be
greeted with a pop-up window: “Allow [app name] to track your activity across
other companies’ apps and websites?” You can choose “Ask App Not to Track” or
“Allow.”
When we select “Ask App Not to Track,” two things happen.
The first is that Apple disables the app from using an Apple device identifier,
a random string of letters and numbers assigned to our iPhones and used to
track our activities across apps and websites. The second is that we
communicate to the app developer that, broadly speaking, we don’t want our
information to be tracked and shared with anyone in any way.
That seems easy enough. But No. 2 is where things also get
slightly complicated.
Ad-tech companies already have many ways to follow us beyond
Apple’s device identifier. For example, advertisers can use a method called
fingerprinting. This involves looking at seemingly innocuous characteristics of
your device — such as screen resolution, operating-system version and model —
and combining them to determine your identity and track you across different
apps.
It’s difficult for Apple to block all tracking and
fingerprinting happening on iPhones, privacy researchers said. That would
require knowing about or predicting every new tracking method that an ad-tech
firm comes up with.
Overdue Features
Apple’s new software also includes two other interesting new
features: the ability to use Siri to play audio with a third-party app such as
Spotify and the option to quickly unlock an iPhone while wearing a mask.
For many, these will feel long overdue. Siri has generally
worked only with
Apple Music for music playback since 2015, which has been
annoying and inconvenient for those who want to use the voice assistant to play
songs using other music apps. The change comes as antitrust scrutiny mounts
over whether Apple stifles competition by favoring its own apps.
To make Siri work with other audio services, you won’t have
to change any settings. If you normally listen to music with a third-party app,
such as Spotify, Siri will simply learn over time that you prefer that app and
react accordingly. (Audio-app developers need to program their apps to support
Siri, so if they haven’t done so yet, this won’t work.) That means if you
always use Spotify to play music, you will be able to say “Hey, Siri, play the
Beatles” to start playing a Beatles playlist on Spotify.
The other new feature helps solve a pandemic issue. For more
than a year, wearing a mask has been extra annoying for owners of newer iPhones
that have face scanners to unlock the device. That’s because the iPhone camera
has not been able to recognize our covered mugs. Apple’s iOS 14.5 finally
delivers a mechanism to unlock the phone while masked, although it requires
wearing an Apple Watch.
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