Apple’s push towards Web Browsing Privacy — Privacy Preserving Ad Click Attribution

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WebKit, the browser engine on which Apple’s Safari runs, announced an API called Privacy Preserving Ad Click Attribution. It will be a limited form of click-to-conversion tracking that will be built directly into the browser. WebKit is an open source Web Content Engine for browsers and other applications. Among the major browsers, only Apple’s Safari uses WebKit. Google Chrome is powered by Blink, which is a fork for the WebCore component of WebKit. This privacy-first API is presently available preview in Safari for Mac, iPhone and iPad users.

In order to sell you stuff and services across the web, advertisers use ad click attribution. This is why when you search for a “OnePlus 7 Pro” on Google (or Amazon), you are hounded around the web with ads of that particular phone. This attribution i.e. identification that you are interested in a certain product, is done via storing cookies on your device. The advertisers also know whether you click-through a certain ad and later purchased the product or engaged in the web page that is advertised.

The traditional cookie method has virtually no limit on how much of data is shared during your browsing. Presently, there is a full cross-site tracking of users in the name of ad click attribution.

The new technology announced by WebKit plans to tackle this problem of unlimited invasion of privacy of a web user by doing four things.

1. Not Identifying a User Across Websites — This new technology will limit the number of ad campaigns and conversion events on a website to 64. Doing this means users cannot be uniquely identified across websites for the purpose of ad click attribution. An advertiser needs to know two types of information regarding your advertisement — how many people who saw the ad clicked on it and what percentage of those ad clicks converted into a sale (or a sign-up). It’s quite obvious an advertiser doesn’t need to know if you specifically bought it. They simply need the numbers. And this Privacy Preserving Ad Click Attribution will do that.
2. Only The Website Visited Will be Involved in Measuring Ad Click Conversion — Third parties will not be able to receive the ad click attribution reports. So, when you are using a browser with this WebKit technology, the third-party services will not be able to process the ad click data.
3. There are Built-in Browser features for Reporting ad click attribution in a Private Manner — WebKit manages this by taking some interesting privacy intensive steps. The browser sends the atribution reports in a dedicated Private Browsing Mode even though the user is in the regular browsing mode. Cookies are prevented from being used for reporting purposes. The sending of reports are randomly delayed between 24 and 48 hours. And if you are doing a private browsing, then no ad click attribution is carried out.
4. Apple will not Learn about the User’s ad clicks or conversion — This feature is a key part of this privacy focused ad click attribution technology. All the work done by Safari will be carried on-device. Apple (or more generally, the browser vendor) will not have the data regarding ad click attribution.

The traditional cookie method has virtually no limit on how much of data is shared during your browsing. Presently, there is a full cross-site tracking of users in the name of ad click attribution.

When this feature gets out of experimental phase, it will be available for Safari across all Apple platforms — Macs, iPads and iPhones

This technology has not been implemented in the stable Safari yet. However, you can download the Safari Technology Preview and use this feature (Post Installation go to — Develop > Experimental Features > Ad Click Attribution). I have been using it for the last 10 days, and have noticed a glaring difference in the types of ads shown across websites. Just because the other day I was looking for a tee shirt on Amazon, I was shown that tee shirt while reading the news. After the longest of time, Safari has become my primary browser.

This feature can certainly use a better acronym and a branding, because Privacy Preserving Ad Click Attribution is a mouthful. This will reach a small percentage of users, because even many Mac users have Google Chrome as their primary browser. But, it certainly is a step in the right privacy direction by Apple. Blink, the web engine on which the Chromium project is built, will probably not implement this, because in many ways it goes against the Google’s advertising philosophy.

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