Meta, Snap and Pinterest were all up a smidge Monday afternoon during and following Apple’s presentation. In other news, the lack of privacy-related bombshells at WWDC may have been a minor boost to some tech stocks that are still reeling from Apple’s past privacy changes. For now, the feature remains disabled by default and available only to people who pay for Apple’s upgraded iCloud subscription service. It’s unclear whether Apple plans to turn on Private Relay by default in iOS 16, as some have predicted. An IP address is one of the main ingredients used to create a device fingerprint. The following year, in 2021, Apple announced Private Relay, a beta feature in iOS 15 that masks the IP address of any iCloud+ customers using Safari as their browser. In 2020, those words were a prelude to the AppTrackingTransparency framework and Apple’s announcement that developers would be required to ask for explicit permission before using the IDFA for tracking and ad targeting starting with iOS 14. Still, for the past two years, Apple has trained the mobile ad tech community to a Pavlovian response every time Craig Federighi, SVP of software engineering, looks the camera dead in the eye at WWDC and utters the words “Let’s talk about privacy.” The company doesn’t need a WWDC announcement. On reflection, it’s hardly surprising that Apple didn’t dwell on third-party data collection and ad tracking at WWDC this year.Īt this point, there’s no doubt as to where the company stands, and it wouldn’t be out of character for Apple to begin fingerprinting enforcement at any time. It’s a marathon not a (Private) Relay race Apple used WWDC 2019 as its venue to announce the new Mac Pro, and at WWDC 2017 it announced its HomePod smart speaker, updated iMac desktops, and a new 10.5-inch iPad Pro. This feature could allow third-party SDKs to run in a separate environment, making it impossible for one to access and share data without permission.Ī solution like SDK Runtime, which is set for release as part of Android 13, would allow apps to release updates even if their SDK partners are having privacy problems. There’s nothing stopping Apple from devising (and/or cribbing) a technical solution for an upcoming version of iOS inspired by the SDK Runtime in Google’s Android Privacy Sandbox. (When Apple started rejecting apps with Adjust’s SDK last year for alleged fingerprinting, the result was a confusing mess, to say the least.)Īnd so the quandary remains: Apple is categorically anti-fingerprinting and yet doesn’t have an elegant enforcement method to actually prevent the practice. Apple would have to reject updates from any app partnered with an SDK deemed to be in violation of the policies. This means policing fingerprinting could result in serious collateral damage. As Eric Seufert has pointed out, ad tech and measurement companies fingerprint users and devices based on data collected through their SDKs, which developers integrate directly into their apps.
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