The latest version of iOS will have an “Intelligent Tracking Prevention” system built into Safari that not only blocks 3rd party cookies (the common ad trackers) but also various 1st party cookies (which are supposed to be for logins, preferences, site usage tracking, etc.) that also do ad tracking.
The morons in the online ad community are predictably enraged and offended by this. They’re crying about how it will destroy the internet as we know it (it won’t). What’s their reasoning? Well of course because it’s too hard to come up with good ads or sell decent products (all the fake supplements and made-up celebrity gossip columns aren’t good products, you say?) so the online ad people turned to tech to collect as many details as possible about everyone using the internet. The hilarious “Privacy Policy” on a site like Facebook is actually about how you have zero privacy and you’re granting them the right to sell everything about you, including the photo of your puppy with a #PSL.
Apple doesn’t care about this. Sure they have an online ad platform, but they are a hardware and service company. And their services cost money, so they don’t rely on financial support from crappy remarketing ads. Some of their biggest competitors, like Google and Microsoft, happen to rely pretty heavily (in Google’s case, exclusively) on the ad model. So it’s also a way to eat into their revenue.
But in the end, this doesn’t matter. It will hurt for a while. Some small mobile advertising networks may crumble because of this… but the industry has been preparing for the death of cookies for years. Logging IP addresses or simply buying the data straight from the telecom providers is the near-term future of online advertising. Because you can always count on this industry to do the most harmful thing to consumers at any expense rather than consider reforming their business model.
