Thoughts on Apple’s New “Data Auction” Ad
The privacy ad is funnily scary. Yet it fails to highlight a great feature
Just when the likes of Meta, Snap, and Unity are recovering from the App Tracking Transparency feature (after staring at billion-dollar losses), Apple has released a 90-second commercial to showcase their latest iPhone privacy features — which primarily includes the Mail Privacy Protection and App Tracking Transparency feature.
The limelight given to App Tracking Transparency comes as a surprise to me since Apple had already released a commercial to highlight that feature a year ago. This begs the question: why is Apple marketing the ATT feature so much? More so, since ATT wasn’t as efficient from a privacy standpoint as it was promised.
I think they were better off highlighting the newer iOS 15 privacy-focused feature for advertisers. But before we get into it, let’s see what the “Data Auction” ad was all about.
The commercial starts off with Ellie, an iPhone user getting drawn into a store’s backdoor where her iPhone data auction is happening. From email harvesting to transaction and browsing history, the auctioneer leaves no stone unturned in selling Ellie’s data to advertisers. But just before her most prestigious data was put up for auction, the protagonist taps the “Ask App Not to Track” and “Protect Mail Activity” buttons to prevent trackers from selling her data.
I think the Apple commercial did well on two fronts:
explaining a complex privacy feature and spreading awareness about how advertisers make money from our data.
slyly taking a stab at other big tech rivals (read: Google, Facebook) by deeming them as dubious data brokers and bidders.
Despite the wittiness, I think the commercial was inaccurate. As Washington Post’s analysts found out: apps are able to work around the ATT through device fingerprinting (using user’s device-specific data like IP address, and battery level to build a unique profile) — thereby making the App Tracking Transparency feature a letdown for privacy advocates.
I feel Apple was better off focusing on the iOS 15 SKAdNetwork
changes through the commercial.
For the uninitiated, SKAdNetwork
is Apple’s privacy-focused ad network attribution API that helps advertisers measure clicks and installs. Earlier, only large self-attributed networks like Facebook and Google had access to the data sent back by the SKAdNetwork
…and evidently, they’d share only some of the data with the small advertisers.
With iOS 15, developers can opt-in to get raw postbacks data for their app thereby giving advertisers more transparency about successful ad conversion data and also eliminating the data brokers — making it a win-win for privacy lovers and advertisers.