How Privacy Regulation Influence Marketers And Users
Privacy issue becomes one of the biggest concerns in recent years. We all realize that web pages and phone apps usually have pop-up windows showing advertisements or product recommendations which we were looking for online. It comes to the privacy concern that we feel unsafe being tracked all the time.
Driven by online privacy concerns, Apple began showing a pop-up window on iPhones with an updated iOS 15 system that asked people to consent to be tracked by apps. This feature was called App Tracking Transparency (ATT). With the high concern about personal privacy, many users opt-out. The portion of tracked users fell from 73% at the start of 2021 to 32% by now.
Apple’s privacy update made it harder for marketers to track iPhone users and target them with relevant marketing. Thus, E-commerce companies had to pay higher prices for digital advertising. Instead of using third-party data, first-party data became more important and useful for marketers to focus on. However, it was difficult for marketers to collect enough consumer information to make accurate marketing segmentation decisions since around 50% of people tend not to share personal information with marketers, even with promotion incentives.
Not only Apple is putting efforts to protect its users’ privacy, but also Google is planning to ban third-party tracking cookies in 2023 to eliminate its users’ privacy information. As a marketer, it becomes harder to collect potential consumers’ data and their right data. Since people are under protection from companies like Apple and Google, the information marketers can get may not be correct.
Chrome’s cookie update is bad for advertisers since it increases the spending for marketers and advertisers to target their audience. A recent survey from GetApp, which provided HubSpot with exclusive data, discovered that: 44% of marketers predict a need to increase their spending by 5% to 25% in order to reach the same goals as 2021. It is a huge increase that marketers have to spend extra money on advertising. Moreover, email marketing will again become the most common marketing tool since the survey shows that 23% of marketing experts plan on investing in email marketing software due to Google’s new policy.
As a user, we care about our privacy a lot that we want to make sure every personal information we provided online can be protected well rather than being sold as beneficial data. Whether the tech companies take seriously users’ privacy as confidential work will have a strong impact on users’ daily lives. Privacy regulation provides us with a safer internet environment that we are feeling protected. If users find out that their privacy is no longer safe anymore, they will start to worry about every piece of information they have stored in their phones or laptops.
In general, I think privacy regulation has a more positive impact on future development. There will always be another way for marketers to target their audience. However, if users do not trust the internet anymore, it will become more difficult to collect their personal information since they feel unsafe and creepy always being tracked.
