Taking Your Privacy Seriously
Apple is known for keeping their customers data private; publicly discussing the steps they take to secure their users data, and showing that they do not want to profit off their users data. When they released their iOS 14.5 update, a lot was riding on it. Billions of dollars for many companies who use the data provided by the iPhone to advertise to the users. What I want to discuss is: 1) What do you as a user see 2) What do advertisers get now 3) What the future might hold.
What You See
There are many articles around the new changes in iOS 14.5, and many posted earlier than me, (I’m a little late). Here’s one from The Verge one from Business Insider. The main changes are that you will see a notice asking to be tracked for advertising purposes. See this one from Instagram.
Here you can see they are asking to help personalize ads for you, keep Instagram free, and support businesses to reach their customers. Many companies are following suit with this same general message. Keep the products you use free, and help the businesses you rely on by allowing us to advertise to you.
Apple also allows you to turn them off in the Settings—>Privacy—>Tracking. Here's what mine looks like.
Notice something? They are all turned off. But wait, don't you want the apps to stay free? Don't you want them to be able to provide you with ads that are relevant? Sure! Lets read on.
What Do Advertisers Get
Honestly? I'm not sure. While they say their goal is to help you get what you need, I honestly don't need anything. They are just forcing it on me though advertisements as services that I would much rather pay for. But look, see a couple apps there that I think are odd? AccuWeather & QuickBooks. I pay for their products. Why are they trying to track me? For what advertising purposes are they needing to monitor me? I digress. Lets continue with "What do they get?"
So if you read further, you can go to the App Store and find what each app tracks and monitors. Many of these apps get it all. Look at Instagram.
It's a wonder only 4% of Apple users have allowed tracking for any apps. When we are given an option, we choose not to be tracked and monitored. You know why? We don't have a clue what they are using, and what they are using it for. The "Other Data" category is rather ominous and non-specific. Good luck making us believe its "for our good."
Oh, and one other thing, has anyone noticed the amount of advertisements have gone down? No? Me neither. Seems like we will continue to be advertised to, just might not be those pair of shoes we were looking at 5 minutes ago.
What the Future Might Hold
Honestly, I continue to hold my head up for the future of technology. I think we have covered a lot of good ground in the past couple years as people are starting to ask the question, what are these companies vacuuming up and why do they need this data?
There have been many approaches, from Apple's, give it back to the user to allow tracking or not, to Googles FLOC method (which needs some work, but still better than what we have now). Honestly I think there is a good mixture of both methods for the best result and balance of privacy vs marketability.
Here are some of my ideas:
Give the user access to share what we want when we want. If we don't want Instagram to know all our Contacts, Identifiers, Usage Data, etc. let us select what to share. We're almost there with giving control over camera, and other hardware aspects of our devices, lets just take it a little further. As these companies already know, we are only going to that setting once. Once its off its off for good. We aren't going to think about it anymore. Seriously, why would we make it easier for them to gobble data we haven't a clue why they need it or who they are selling it to or how they are using it to market to us.
Make a marketing/ advertising app. Yeah, this would likely go nowhere, but why not make an app that you, the user have control over what you want to share in an Instagram style scroll platform, to view all the products you are looking for. Say I'm looking for a new laptop. I am willing to share my age, my general location, my FLOC like preferences (I don't even need to know all the details, but at least let me see a breakout of it), and what types of laptops I prefer. Then I get a beautiful scrolling list of laptops from different companies based on those preferences I selected and shared only once. Then when I'm done, all that information goes in the bin and when I'm searching for shorts, none of the shorts salespeople knows I just bought a laptop. Because seriously, why would they need to know that?
In the End...
While I think the decision to open up and share what is being shared with advertisers and giving you the option to accept or deny being tracked is a very good step forward for data privacy, I see why companies are hesitant in sharing what information they track. That is their lifeline, that is how they make their money. Sharing how they advertise and how they use your data opens them up to other competition, and its just natural to restrict that information and claim its “magic.” Knowing how the app gathers your data and how it is used to advertise to you will become the next thing people watch. Advertisers will have to get on board with how this change impacts their bottom line. I think the future of data management, though an advertising app, or data sharing practices that are different than they are now will be an improvement over how it is being done now. Time will tell how these changes are accepted by both the user and the advertiser.
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