This fall, new privacy features are coming from Apple with the iOS 15 update.
“Privacy has been central to our work at Apple from the very beginning. Every year, we push ourselves to develop new technology to help users take more control of their data and make informed decisions about whom they share it with. This year’s updates include innovative features that give users deeper insights and more granular control than ever before.”
Craig Federighi, Apple’s senior vice president of Software Engineering.
Most mobile applications require access to the microphone, location, camera, contacts, photos, and more. With the iOS 15 update, users will receive the App Privacy Report, which shows how often each app has used these permissions in the last seven days and indicates all third-party domains contacted by those apps to share those data.
The speech recognition of Siri will be processed by default directly on the iPad or iPhone. Some requests can even be processed without an internet connection.
This update includes iCloud Private Relay, Hide My Email, and expanded HomeKit Secure Video support. Private Relay makes sure to encrypt the traffic leaving a device. Hide My Email gives the users more control about who is able to contact them. Finally, the HomeKit Secure Video ensures end-to-end encrypted storage for video footage.
Several updates will directly influence digital marketing.
“Cookies for cross-site resources are now blocked by default across the board [in iOS 15]. This is a significant improvement for privacy since it removes any sense of exceptions.”
Apple’s WebKit privacy engineer, John Wilander.
The Intelligent Tracking Prevention “is getting even stronger by also hiding the user’s IP address from trackers”. As states in Apple’s press release, “this means they can’t utilize the user’s IP address as a unique identifier to connect their activity across websites and build a profile about them”. The IP address will also be hidden in the Mail app, thanks to the Mail Privacy Protection. This way, when a user receives a marketing email, the sender cannot know anything about your location, what you do online, and if you opened the email or not.
The blocking of third-party cookies by Apple and Google started to re-shape the digital marketing industry over the last months. Unlike Adello, which used advertising ID instead of cookies from the very beginning, many AdTech and MarTech solution providers had to reinvent the way they run their technologies. They had to go cookieless by collecting information from the browser like the version, plugins, screen resolution, IP address, etc. Well, now we know that the collection of IP addresses will be soon impossible on Apple’s devices. Moreover, email marketing will have to work with less information about its iOS subscribers.
Challenges always open new opportunities for marketers to change the game and find new ways to effectively reach out to their customers. Use your creativity to shape the future of your advertising strategy, and do not hesitate to contact us for third-party cookies alternatives 😊
