How Apple has just taken the war against targeted advertising to a new level

A good article by Anupam Chugh on Medium titled “Apple is killing a billion-dollar ad industry with one popup” provides some very interesting facts about the coming battle over targeted advertising after the launch of iOS 14, already available in public beta, which could create major problems for the sophisticated tracking systems used to manage it.

The arrival of iOS 13 severely restricted the impenitent and impertinent use of users’ geolocation information by third parties who had no justification for knowing where we were at any given time, but iOS 14 will serve users with a dialog box asking them to decide between “Allow Tracking” or “Ask the application not to track” their advertising identifiers (IDFA). Would anyone in their right mind choose the first option? Considering the misery that targeted advertising has inflicted on us for years, you’d have to be a masochist. And what will happen when the vast majority of users decide to hide their advertising identifiers, used by systems such as Google or Facebook, and which include more tan 100,000 apps within the App Store to capture your data and send it to data brokers?

What is Apple doing? It’s simply trying to put an end to a racket that should have been shut down years ago. The current state of online advertising has been described as deception, a bubble, a negative force destroying the internet and the world, responsible for making us increasingly unhappy, to the point that some voices are calling for a ban. The question is how we got here and why our patience and that of advertisers didn’t run out long ago.

The only way to fix a system that punishes users, deceives advertisers and only benefits a few is to introduce as much clarity and transparency into it as possible. Do you want to receive targeted advertising? Then say so expressly. On the other hand, do you want the apps you use to capture everything do on your device and send it to data brokers who will resell it? Say no and companies that have built business models based on such predatory abuse will have to find something else to do.

The reaction of large organizations such as The New York Times has been to understand that they are capable of generating data about their own users by themselves, without resorting to intermediaries, and from this month, will exclude that data as harmful to privacy, focusing on what they obtain on their own platform. For a company with six million readers, the alternative makes sense, especially if those readers understand that their data is not being misused and that any advertising you receive will from the newspaper itself, not from an army of middlemen who prey on your information. In time, the idea of having to accept dozens of cookies to access a page will be seen for what it was: the product of a primitive era in which some people exploited a system far beyond any reasonable limit.

For smaller companies, unable to develop their own advertising platforms, the future will be difficult. But at least it will not be based on the unlimited exploitation of ignorance and asymmetric information by a few monopolies.

Apple’s latest move reflects its commitment to its users’ privacy, potentially attracting people who value it. Time will tell if its leadership ends up extending the concept to the rest of the companies that participate in the ecosystem or if, on the contrary, it is simply a privilege for those who can afford it.

(En espa?ol, aquí)

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