US ad trade bodies warn Apple’s new Safari browser threatens the internet’s economic model

I’m not sure that the problem raised here, and the enormous consequences are understood by many. I started writing this post earlier this morning, but got side-tracked. Ev’s comment on my LinkedIn post about this topic reminded me to complete the post.

The “soft” warnings have been there for a number of years, with DoNotTrack, Cookie Blockers, AdBlockers, 3P Tracking Blocking, The EFF toolset (HTTPS everywhere, PrivacyBadger), Advertising Opt Outs, the Snowden revelations on AdTech insecurities (https://www.theverge.com/2013/12/12/5204196/how-advertisers-became-the-nsa-best-friend), Peace Browser on iOS (https://marco.org/2015/09/18/just-doesnt-feel-good ), the rise of ad-free services like Netflix & Spotify… yet the both the technology vendors and publishers choose to ignore the user’s “request” of DoNotTrack within browser settings.

DoNotTrack’s website says it all really; “In February 2012, the major online advertising trade groups pledged at the White House to support Do Not Track by year-end; that promise remains unfulfilled. Efforts to standardize Do Not Track in the World Wide Web Consortium have resulted in deadlock, despite frequent urging by American and European policymakers.” http://donottrack.us/

The blocking capability that Apple are implementing has been in Firefox for a number of versions (Item 4. In link) https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/enable-and-disable-cookies-website-preferences with cookies being able to be burned with user-defined timing.

Firefox (5.5-7.5% marketshare) + more importantly Safari (30-36% marketshare) collectively have a similar market share to Google’s Chrome (~40%) in AU – http://gs.statcounter.com/brow...../australia , so the consequences are significant of up to one in three of the AU population potentially being affected.

Anyhow, my points;
1) The major technology platforms are no doubt trying to cirumvent these changes, it’s not been something that has been discussed widely, with it only really coming to general view in the last two weeks, and whilst the larger technology vendors will likely have the scale to work around this, it could be challenging to others, who could find that the limitations to their technology could be dibilitating
2) What does it mean to the managed service DSP’s, the Agency Tradedesks who collect and monetise the data, Data Aggregators, the networks that rely on their cookie being down
3) What does it mean for audience verification vendors who have 3P pixel piggybacks
4) Cookies and 3P ID’s are the fabric of syncing between adtech and tracking on the web, there are and will be work arounds to these blocks, but, they signal a marked change in the direction of user control vs. publisher and adtech control
5) Chrome is stopping Autoplay content with sound ads (https://venturebeat.com/2017/09/14/chrome-will-no-longer-autoplay-content-with-sound-in-january-2018/), and is allegedly introducing an Ad filter (https://techcrunch.com/2017/06/01/googles-built-in-chrome-ad-blocker-said-to-be-more-of-a-quality-filter/) in the new year
6) Vijay’s statement “Apple’s lack of transparency may make it hard for online advertisers to manage the restrictions.” Doesn’t make a lot of sense to me, it isn’t “Apple” introducing a lack of transparency, it is a shift of control back to the user, meaning that publishers and brands will need to make it compelling for users to accept their individual advertising technology partners cookies, AND the cookie of their technology providers almost every time they visit one of their sites. How this would be executed remains very unclear.
Relating to the consequences that are mentioned – yes, will be less transparency in the advertising market, but apple would say that this shouldn’t be at a sacrifice to user privacy. The IAB “Future of the Cookie Group” never came to anything apart from a whitepaper (http://www.iab.com/insights/th.....he-cookie/ ) – See Section #7 where many of the recommendations haven’t been broadly adopted.
7) Vijay’s second point; “What is most problematic is the seemingly opaque criteria for the restrictions. This makes it hard for advertisers and publishers to consistently manage.” It is very clear from the technical specifications (http://webkit.org/blog/7675/in.....revention/), that the user controls the cookie acceptance/rejection through the domain being “on” or “off”, and unless there is a visit to the issuing site, the cookie will expire after one day.
8) If a user then does not visit the issuing domain of a cookie within 30 days, the cookie will be deleted
9) It is possible to run and set up cross domain tracking for a specific domains that you own, by passing data as URL parameters (Link Decoration)(Eg. https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection/analyticsjs/cross-domain) it’s also a core feature from the likes of Ensighten, Adobe, Oracle and I am sure of a number of other leading solutions
10) It is also possible that we will see the immediate enactment of pseudo 1 Party adserving solutions on both the demand and the supply side. There could also be a manged service to sync ID’s or cookies from a hosted pixel solution. Imagine a tag manager for S-S ID sync’ing
11) Data aggregators and sellers will likely be quite challenged, however a shared identity solution (like AppNexus / LiveRamp proposed earlier this year) does potentially negate some of this risk, however, the user still has to accept the cookie
12) iFrames won’t be a solution as it will still have a souce: of the iFrame disparate to the 1P issuing domain
13) The irony does not escape me that I actively work in this specific space, and utilise some of the technology available through these tools, but as we do currently, working on projects, we/I have to be smarter than just relying on this obfuscated information.
14) The key point here will be how the large advertising and data technology vendors will manage this, as this will determine the impact for both Publishers and Adverters alike. The consequence could be quite severe for both sides of the fence, however to what degree we just don’t know until the solutions or workarounds, or acceptance are clear.

Thanks to Ian Kenney for clarifying some of the technical elements

Other Links of interest or reference;

Apple’s response to the criticism; http://www.loopinsight.com/201.....-blocking/
Paul – The article reference is wrong “Apple’s ARKit augmented reality tool”, it is WEBKIT, not ARKit (http://webkit.org/blog/7675/in.....revention/ ).
How this affects GA – https://croud.com/blog/analytics/apples-intelligent-tracking-prevention-critical-role-google-analytics/
How it affects paid search tracking – http://searchengineland.com/go.....ion-282233
How people like AdRoll handle this – https://help.adroll.com/hc/en-us/articles/212675877-Retargeting-on-Safari
Shared Identity Matching (AppNexus, MediaMath and LiveRamp, which provides the data matching. Other launch partners include Index Exchange, Rocket Fuel, LiveIntent and OpenX.) – https://adexchanger.com/online-advertising/consorting-frenemy-ad-tech-players-partner-shared-identity-matching/
Top level “how it currently works” (excuse the .cc domain); http://clearcode.cc/2015/12/cookie-syncing/