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Even if screen sharing on FaceTime *is* a godsend, at Apple’s annual developer conference on Monday, most marketers were likely paying more attention to the company’s privacy announcements.
What did we hear? Lots of things that start with P.
- Mail Privacy Protect: This prevents email senders (think marketers) from knowing when a user opens an email in the Mail app. It also conceals user IP addresses so they can’t be linked to other online behavior.
- App Privacy Report: A feature that lets people see how frequently apps (that have gotten permission) accessed things like their photos, location, or microphone over the past week—and if that data was shared elsewhere.
- iCloud Private Relay: It’s basically a virtual private network (VPN) that Apple says makes users untraceable while they browse Safari.
When are the updates rolling out? Sometime this fall, Apple said.
+1: Apple will now be sharing raw data collected by iOS app install campaigns with both advertisers and ad networks, like Google or Facebook, mobile marketing analyst Eric Seufert pointed out on Twitter this week. Previously, Google and Facebook only gave advertisers an aggregated version. In other words, if you’re advertising an app, you’ll now get metrics straight from Apple.
“This certainly helps advertisers in a big way,” Andrew Moore, a media strategist at Horizon Next, told Marketing Brew. “Up until this announcement, the publishers were grading their own homework, so to speak.”
But the data is limited...because privacy: Apple’s SKAdNetwork, introduced in 2018, measures “the success of ad campaigns while maintaining user privacy,” as the company puts it. “It’s not nearly as granular as the data [advertisers] had before,” Seufert told us, explaining that brands have a “much more limited view of what users do once they install your app.”
A reminder: Apple recently introduced those pesky “Can we track u?” pop-ups on iPhones. Oh, and Google is killing third-party cookies by 2022.
As companies begin to take user privacy more seriously, Apple’s showing that its commitment is more than just a marketing campaign: “Privacy is not just rhetoric from Apple. It was actually refreshing to see [them] be so concrete about it,” Dr. Augustine Fou, a privacy advocate and ad-fraud consultant, told Marketing Brew. “It’s another tsunami that’s hitting ad tech...Most of these companies are going to die and go away.”