With the GDPR having brought privacy conversations to the wider public, privacy online has become an important talking point for all tech companies. Users across the board are looking for more options when it comes to controlling how much of their data is collected. They’re also demanding more transparency on where data is going and how it is being used. This rise in user expectation is a good thing and companies are making important first steps.
More Privacy on Your Internet Safari
Apple recently announced an update to their Safari browser that will provide users with more privacy while also helping marketers gather the data they need. Currently, when you click on an ad, tiny trackers on websites track you clicks from page to another. They can even build profiles for individual users to help marketers learn how people are going from web page to shopping cart. Apple thinks that this is faaaar too much information being shared and has offered a solution.
Called “Privacy Preserving Ad Click Attribution,” this new system would track ads clicks while also keeping certain information private. This new technology will make some changes, including:
1. Limiting the amount of campaign IDs for each site keeping them from assigning them to specific users.
2. Only websites where the ad was clicked will be able to measure click rates, cutting out third parties.
3. Browsers will delay sending data, at random, for up to 2 days.
4. Keeping all of this at the browser level, networks and merchants can only see so much.
Standardization? Only Time Will Tell
It’s an interesting compromise and one Apple is hoping to make standard through sharing the tech with the World Wide Web Consortium. And Apple is not the only one to make changes to the way such data is being processed. Google also recently announced changes to Chrome’s use of cookies. (FYI, cookies are little bits of information your browser saves about you, including stuff like usernames and passwords.) These changes make it harder for cookies to track you across many websites, as developers must tell the browser which cookies explicitly to track. For both companies, these changes will apply for mobile and desktop platforms.
These changes may seem small, but will impact marketers across every field. Many marketers user ad-click conversion data in everything from Instagram posts to website clicks. And, for many, being able to construct profiles of customers has become key in their strategies. But, there’s also the question of how invasive such stats are and if we need to know everything about users.This solution may not be perfect, but marketers need to step back and examine what information we truly need. The loss of some stats may be hard to adjust to, but marketing existed long before the age of the internet and managed to do great things. We can too.
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