Many free applications take advantage of ad tracking. They collect a certain amount of data about their users to sell to advertisers. This information includes websites that users have visited and other services or applications they use. Very useful data for advertisers and targeted advertising
Advertising tracking
Since 2010, every iPhone has been linked to an Advertiser Identifier (IDFA), a unique identifier consisting of numbers and letters. With this tag, companies can recognize users and collect information about the websites they visit or the applications they use to customize their advertisements.
Ad tracking is a measure of campaign performance by tracking user activity in the days after an ad is served. If a user sees an ad on Facebook for a headset and he doesn’t click on it but in the following days he does a search about it on Google.
the advertiser will know about this because Every product you search for is linked to your IDFA ID and then shared with other partner apps that quickly display advertisements for that type of product.
End Of Targeted advertising
This is where iOS 14.5 and its app tracking transparency features come in and somehow compromise it. In fact, app developers must explicitly ask users for permission to track them outside of their app and thus collect data for targeted advertising.
If users refuse to be tracked, applications will no longer be able to track user activity outside of their platform. They will therefore only be able to collect data on the behavior of their users on their platform.
In fact, not much will change for users. They will actually see the same number of advertisements on the web. However, the latter is no longer targeted as it is affected by the limited amount of data collected for users.
While there aren’t many changes to the user experience, implementing this feature is frowned upon by apps whose business model is based on ad tracking. This is especially the case with Facebook, which has firmly stated its resistance to this data protection function.
Apps Will Still Earn Revenue
apps can still sell their users’ information, but it is less accurate because it is limited to what users do on their own platform. Advertisers can no longer know what percentage of users are affected by an ad. Therefore, the ad revenue from the application must decrease.
When you launch an app after downloading iOS 14.5, your iPhone or iPad will ask you whether you agree to been tracked or not. However, you can disable your device settings on a more global basis. In Settings, go to Privacy, Tracking, and uncheck the “Allow app tracking requests” option.