Apple’s iOS 14 Backlash against Data-Hungry Tech Giants
The big new launch in tech this week is Apple’s iOS14, and among many of its new tools, privacy becomes the focus. New features mean that users are always notified, whatever app or website they are on, that their data is being used, and most crucially, they have the option now to refuse data sharing.
This makes businesses who rely on this data worry, with reason.
Our previous post, “How the tourism sector is using your data” explored the vital new steps that user data can create for businesses in the tourism sector. By accessing data such as location and web searches, these businesses can refine their focus and sell the best holiday packages that suit their customer needs, which boosts the experience of the customer as well as the locals in the tourist destination. With iOS14, these customers may stop sharing this data, making the business model of the future fall flat.
In a recent report, it was found that disabling online cookies led to a drop of 52% in revenue, and a median drop of 64%. It will be more crucial than ever for app and website developers to find ways to motivate their customers to choose to share their data.
When someone clicks on an ad, they are assigned a specific ID for their device, which allows similar ads to be targeted to them throughout the internet. Companies such as Facebook feature this as a large part of their business strategy, Facebook paying $100million for a product called Atlas to do this.
Apple have now adjusted their browser, Safari, to only assign as many as 16 ID codes to users, massively limiting the specificity that companies can use to track their customers, totally derailing the whole internet ecosystem.
When opening an app, it will show a window to inform them what type of data they are sharing with the app, for instance, location, financial, contact details, browsing history and purchases. Apps will be required to offer an ‘ask app not to track’ button, with Apple expecting most users to opt for this option rather than ‘Allow tracking’. Knowing this, Apple tried to find a middle ground; They reduced the data assigned to the user, such as only sharing approximate location rather than exact location, in order to preserve their privacy, but by left enough to allow advertisers to adequately target adverts, just without an identifiable person.
“Privacy is a fundamental human right and at the core of everything we do. That’s why with iOS 14, we’re giving you more control over the data you share and more transparency into how it’s used.” Apple say about iOS14.
Apple has long been privacy-conscious, and understandably so, when they’re one of the few tech giants who generate their profit from hardware rather than data. Their CEO, Tim Cook, speaks of their competitors as “gobbling up everything they can learn about you and trying to monetize it.” as if it is a bad thing.
Facebook, Instagram, Amazon; all familiar names that we love and many of us use daily. Without our data, they’ll not be the platforms that perform for us in the ways that make our lives easier.
Kwame Dublin and Humayun Qureshi, the Co-Founders of Digital Bucket Company, a specialist consultancy in big data, say they support the new Apple update.
“As with any kind of regulation, there must be balance between protecting user privacy and staying dynamic for optimal service delivery. People need to be aware of what their data is being used for, and have that choice to share it, but we certainly don’t agree with the negative portrayal of data sharing that Apple has created with the new update; Sharing data is not a bad thing. But what should be taboo is selling data to third-parties.
Companies that buy third-party data run into all kinds of issues, which is something we work with clients to solve by giving them solutions to collect their own data, bringing back control.”
Apple have certainly thrown up a big debate about how businesses should work, making them re-adjust their business models to suit better user privacy while still somehow managing to perform their personalised services with less data. The way forward is to get more creative about the different kinds of data that can be collected without infringing on user privacy, and seeing more companies generating their own datasets by moving away from third-party data.
This was written by a researcher at a specialist data company. The Digital Bucket Company operates in the UK and works with clients in overcoming data challenges including privacy concerns.
