Apple Sends The Digital Ad Industry Scrambling To Preserve Web Tracking

In June, an Apple security engineer wrote a blog post that sent the bustling, $83 billion digital ad industry reeling. In it, he described a new feature, recently rolled out in the latest version of Apple’s Safari web browser, to limit so-called cross-site tracking, where advertising networks and other services can monitor behavior from site to site. The feature, called Intelligent Tracking Prevention (ITP), uses machine learning to spot trackers in the act and limit their reach. The feature quickly won praise from privacy advocates–the Electronic Frontier Foundation called Apple’s move “an important step to protect your privacy.” The online advertising sector has not been as supportive.

In a letter published in Sept, a group of industry groups slammed the software rollout as harmful to ad-supported sites and consumers alike. They argue that Apple’s move substitutes the company’s standards for industrywide conventions around cookies, the digital files used to record user behavior and settings online, and will lead to consumers seeing less relevant and useful ads. Safari, the letter said, “breaks those standards and replaces them with an amorphous set of shifting rules that will hurt the user experience and sabotage the economic model for the internet.”