A monorail train displaying Google signs will pass a billboard advertising Apple iPhone security at the 2019 Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, Nevada, USA, on Monday, January 7, 2019.
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The long-running privacy update on Apple’s iPhone and iPad operating systems that could seriously hurt mobile advertising is coming “in early spring,” Apple told CNBC on Wednesday.
To target mobile ads and measure how effective they are, app developers and other business players often use Apple (IDFA), or a series of letters and numbers that are different on each Apple device. But once this update is rolled out, app makers will be asked to ask a user IDFA for permission through a promotion. It is expected that many users will say no, reducing the effectiveness of targeted ads.
Apple first announced the change last summer, giving advertisers and app makers plenty of time to prepare. But it has become a major topic of controversy for backed companies, which could lose revenue from the switchover.
Facebook in particular argues that the change will hurt the availability of free content on the open web and the ability of small businesses to place personalized ads. On Wednesday’s Q4 2020 employment call on Wednesday, CEO Mark Zuckerberg reversed the change, calling Apple one of its biggest competitors and saying the change “threatens the personalized ads that millions of small businesses rely on them to find and reach customers. ”
Apple’s time of change has been the subject of intense speculation in the mobile industry. Apple CEO Tim Cook is set to speak Thursday on data privacy at the Computers, Confidentiality and Data Protection conference in Brussels. On Thursday, the company also released new marketing materials, including an update to their website and a data usage report to show how companies monitor user data across sites websites and apps.
Apple told CNBC that the next beta version of iOS will require app developers to ask permission for the phone’s unique identifier.
The current version is iOS 14.4, which was released earlier this week. Currently the public beta version is no longer the ones available to developers. Apple declined to provide any additional details.
As companies prepare for the change, they let partners and advertisers know how they plan to deal with the change. Google said Wednesday in a post that it will not use any information that comes under Apple’s AppTrackingTransparency framework for its iOS apps, and that it does not expect to appear promptly on those apps .
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