Apple recently confirmed that its long-awaited privacy updates for the iPhone and iPad operating systems will come in the early spring, and acknowledged that this may have a huge impact on the mobile advertising industry.

At present, in order to play targeted advertising and measure its effect, application developers and other industry participants often use Apple's IDFA, which is the unique identifier composed of letters and numbers on each apple device. After the policy is updated, application developers must obtain user permission to track and share users' IDFA identifiers. Many users are expected to refuse tracking, which will reduce the effectiveness of targeted advertising.

"Under the settings option, users can see which applications have requested tracking rights and modify them according to their own needs," Apple said. This change will be widely launched in early spring with the release of new versions of IOS 14, iPad OS 14 and tvos 14, and has been supported by privacy advocates around the world. "

Apple announced its first IDFA policy update last summer, giving advertisers and app developers plenty of time to prepare. But it has become a big controversy for ad backed companies, which may lose a lot of revenue.

In particular, Facebook believes that Apple's change will undermine the availability of free content on the open web and the ability of small businesses to deliver personalized advertising. In the fourth quarter of 2020 earnings call, Mark Zuckerberg, its chief executive, lashed out at the move, calling apple one of its biggest competitors.

Meanwhile, Google said in an article on Wednesday that its IOS app will no longer use any information under Apple's app tracking transparency framework, and it does not plan to display prompts on these apps. (small)

Source: Netease technology report, translated by Baidu