In a pro-privacy move, Apple would limit marketers’ tracking ability

Apple wants to solve digital advertising’s “creepy” problem by making it harder for marketers to track individuals online.

Advertising has allowed the internet to remain free for millions of users, but consumers have lost their taste for cookies and other behavior-monitoring tactics. Pop-up ads and auto-roll videos have given way to “tracking pixels,” which follow consumers around the internet—leading many shoppers to feel spied on.

However, this technology has been an invaluable source of information for marketers looking to learn about potential buyers. Apple asserts that it can protect privacy while still offering marketers valuable feedback on their campaigns.

It wrote in a blog post:

As more and more browsers acknowledge the problems of cross-site tracking, we should expect privacy-invasive ad click attribution to become a thing of the past.

We propose a modern way of doing ad click attribution that doesn’t allow for cross-site tracking of users but does provide a means of measuring the effectiveness of online ads. It is built into the browser itself and runs on-device which means that the browser vendor does not get to see what ads are clicked or which purchases are made.