Apple Privacy Change and Social Network — Part 2 Apple’s Approach
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In the last article, we discussed the basics of how Apple’s privacy changes have impacted social network companies. Here we are going to discuss how Apple has implemented this.
Motivation
What is the motivation behind all those for Apple? Let's first see who are the players here:
- Users: good user experience!
- Advertisers: conversions
- Apps (Facebook etc): DAU, Revenue (ARPU — Average Revenue Per User)
- Apple: sell more device, more App developers, and connects with Advertisers (eating the Apps’ pie)
Advertisers and Apps have mostly aligned interests. Users and Apps/Advertisers are not always the opponent, having better-targeted ads are actually good as many apps are fed on ads. The problem is that is at the expense of the User’s Privacy (like the user’s interest) and the User’s Attention. So the user doesn’t want to share too much information with Apps. Therefore, Apple has the motivation to improve privacy which is good for the users so people will buy more apple devices and own the data.
The History
From the previous article, Facebook and almost all online company wants to identify users with a unique ID.
- Before iOS-5, UDID (Device ID) is used
- After iOS-5, UDID is banned, and Mac & OpenUDID (a hack through clipboard) is used
- After iOS-7, Mac & OpenUDID cannot be reliably acquired and IDFA comes into effect.
IDFA
What is exactly IDFA and how IDFA serves partially the motivation? IDFA is an apple provided identification for the tracking purpose and put the choice for users to be tracked across apps to be a configurable thing.
Apple makes a compromise and brings the concept tracking on the table. Before this, many users don’t even know that they are being tracked. However, Apple doesn’t want to disable this completely because of the ecosystem. If apps cannot do any tracking, App developers will benefit less from the Apple platform. My best guess is at that time, Apple does not want to do this.
New Privacy Change
For Apple now, which is a trillion-dollar company, with a mature ecosystem, Apple moves one step forward.
The critical step further to IDFA is to make it opt-in. This is a common practice for those tech companies to move something from default-opt-in to default-opt-out. Any required steps to achieve something will mean less people will finish it.
The opt-out rate of IDFA goes from 20% to 80% after the launch (source). Behind the scene, this means lots of people welcome this change. This in the long term will make people like iPhones better although the effect is indirect and not that prominent.
Further More, Apple is doubling its revenue with Apple Search Ads (ASA). The reason is similar, Apple also wants the Ads $, and Apple is ‘helping’ shift the budget from those Social Apps by introducing stricter privacy measurement.
Conclusion
Apple is facilitating people to default opt-out of app tracking, making people explicitly allow tracking (IDFA) than making people find the buried option to disable app tracking in settings. Apple is doing this with two major motivations: 1) better user experience of Apple devices and 2) shifting Ad dollars to Apple ecosystem.
