14 DAY TRIAL // Apple’s new Intelligent Tracking Prevention (ITP), which was announced in June 2017 and introduced with iOS 11 in September on iPhone and iPad, is causing a major financial hit for ad firms, whose revenues collapsed just because they’re no longer capable of tracking users online.
One of the largest players in this industry, Criteo, says it expects ad firms to lose hundreds of millions of dollars following the introduction of ITP, and it already reduced its 2018 forecast by a fifth.
In a statement for The Guardian, the general manager of the Interactive Advertising Bureau's Tech Lab, Dennis Buchheim, criticized Apple for its approach, explaining that Cupertino is continuously looking to improve the tracking protection with features that will have an even bigger impact on the ad industry.
“We expect a range of companies are facing similar negative impacts from Apple's Safari tracking changes,” he said. “Moreover, we anticipate that Apple will retain ITP and evolve it over time as they see fit.”
Advertisers originally found a way to run the tracking and use cookies on iPhones even after the introduction of ITP in September, but Apple discovered the loophole shortly after that and patched it with the release of iOS 11.2 in December.
Alternative solutions in the work
But that doesn’t necessarily mean ad firms are giving up. Criteo says it’s still working on “an alternative sustainable solution for the long term,” explaining that this project is still in its early days right now and can’t determine how effective it is at this point.
Apple, on the other hand, say what it wants to do with ITP is protect users against the permanent tracking that takes place when browsing the web.
“Ad tracking technology has become so pervasive that it is possible for ad tracking companies to recreate 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 said in a recent statement.
What’s worse for ad firms is that Apple won’t be alone in this fight against user tracking, as search giant Google also plans to release a built-in ad-blocker for Google Chrome that would block certain ads. Google Chrome is currently the world’s top desktop browser with more than 60% market share.