Advertising industry revolts against Apple’s browser blocking ad tracking

Apparently the entire digital advertising community is up in arms because Apple is baking anti-tracking into its Safari browser. Marketers will only be able to track your online behavior for 24 hours before it restarts in the upcoming release.

So no more “visit a shoe website once and gets ads for shoes for the next month?” Can’t say I’ll miss that. Large advertising groups somehow think we will.

“Apple’s… approach is bad for consumer choice and bad for the ad-supported online content and services consumers love,” said an open letter to Apple signed by the American Association of Advertising Agencies (4A’s), American Advertising Federation (AAF), Association of National Advertisers (ANA), Data & Marketing Association (DMA), Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB), and Network Advertising Initiative (NAI).

I work with digital advertising regularly, and I truly believe in the benefits it brings to businesses. In this case, I think these industry trade groups are on the wrong side of the argument.

We are deeply concerned about the Safari 11 browser update that Apple plans to release, as it overrides and replaces existing user-controlled cookie preferences with Apple’s own set of opaque and arbitrary standards for cookie handling.

Safari’s new “Intelligent Tracking Prevention” would change the rules by which cookies are set and recognized by browsers. In addition to blocking all third-party cookies (i.e. those set by a domain other than the one being visited), as the current version of Safari does, this new functionality would create a set of haphazard rules over the use of first-party cookies (i.e. those set by a domain the user has chosen to visit) that block their functionality or purge them from users’ browsers without notice or choice.

Signed,

American Association of Advertising Agencies (4A’s)
American Advertising Federation (AAF)
Association of National Advertisers (ANA)Data & Marketing Association (DMA)
Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB)Network Advertising Initiative (NAI)

Apple calls it Intelligent Tracking Prevention. The new version will get rid of first-party cookies (site visits) if you haven’t visited the site in the past 30 days. Cookies for third-parties can be in place for just 24 hours.

“Ad tracking technology has become so pervasive that it is possible for ad tracking companies to re-create the majority of a person’s web browsing history. This information is collected without permission and is used for ad re-targeting, which is how ads follow people around the internet. Apple believes that people have a right to privacy.” — Apple representative via Cnet.com

EEG RECORDING IMAGE: By Petter Kallioinen (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)%5D, via Wikimedia Commons