Ad Companies Hit Hard by Apple Safari's New Anti-Tracking Features
Internet advertising companies are feeling the pain as Apple introduced a new privacy feature for their default Safari web browser. This new update stops ad firms from tracking Safari users between the websites they visit.
Called Intelligent Tracking Prevention (ITP), this new Safari feature is now available starting with the High Sierra update and works by using machine learning software to identify and weed out ad trackers from web pages.
After this update, ad firms will have a harder time tracking Safari users as they visit another site, as Engadget explains. This is one browser update that ad companies are not very happy with, as six major advertising firms banded together to release a joint letter complaining about it.
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"Apple's unilateral and heavy-handed approach is bad for consumer choice and bad for the ad-supported online content and services consumers love," the letter said at one point.
"We strongly encourage Apple to rethink its plan to impose its own cookie standards and risk disrupting the valuable digital advertising ecosystem that funds much of today's digital content and services," the letter continued, which was signed by major members of the Coalition of Major Advertising Trade Associations.
The Safari web browser, which accounts for about 15 percent of the global market, could cost advertising firms hundreds of millions of dollars after the ITP update, according to The Guardian.
In one such case, advertising tech company Criterio is now looking at chopping off more than a fifth of their 2018 revenue projections, just from the feature alone. Criterio hauled in $730 million in 2016, before the ITP update, which means that a fifth of that is already more than $140 million for just the company alone.
If other companies are impacted in the same way, the implications for the online advertising industry is huge.
For its part, Apple defended the ITP update by saying that, with today's state of ad-related tracking technology, ad companies can all but recreate a person's 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 explained.
