Earlier this week, stories surfaced that some China-based advertising groups were developing their smart solutions for the new anti-tracking technology which Apple includes with the upcoming versions of iOS 14. Now it looks like the fight against Apple.
Thursday, the Financial Times reported than Apple sent alerts to at least two Chinese apps that were captured trying to create their own unique identifiers for a given app, which Apple’s update explicitly prohibits.
The two apps in question were captured with something called Identifier of the Advertising Association of China (CAID for short), developed by the region trade association with the same name at the end of 2020 as a way to track tracking and segmentation IPhone users long after Apple updates went into effect. The Financial Times first gave the news that some of China’s largest technology companies, such as Baidu, Tencent and Bytedance, were allegedly conducting tests to implement the identifier. Collectively, as reported by these three digital giants control approximately 54% of China total advertising spend.
It’s unclear what Apple’s updates will translate into with the billions of dollars they spend. Here in the U.S., we know that some of the major players in the ad market — particularly Facebook — do forecast some sort of significant revenue falls from iOS update, and have continued to public relations party over the past few months to defend its core business from Apple’s claws.
We wrote a little about what these updates mean — and why Facebook is offensive — in the past, but at the most basic level, the update would simply require applications to prompt the user consent before using a specific advertising identifier (called an IDFA) that is sent to your phone. Without IDFA access, these app developers don’t have the ability to track users outside of their own app, which, as you can imagine, is bad news for banking companies. doing exactly that. While some of them have tried to find their own ways to subvert Apple’s new rules, there are actually some fairly strict guidelines outlaw almost everyone: no “fingerprint,” no summary dataand without creating their own identifiers.
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It turns out that this is what some of these companies based in China were trying to do. For example, TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, uses an adtech platform called Ocean Engine to display identifiers such as a phone’s hardware and IMEI specifications, which are used to assign a unique CAID to your phone. If you look at him privacy conditions by CAID, notes that this identifier is designed to be stored on a server hosted by the Advertising Association itself, meaning that any application that uses the Association’s integrated code could re-call this identifier to market to who uses their particular application. .
If this seems to violate Apple’s strict guidelines here, it’s because it’s absolutely so. But like the initial Financial Times he points out, Apple inexplicably hadn’t done so yet suppressed CAID or any application that implemented it. At least so far, according to the Times, a developer who was caught sneaking into his code was told that Apple found that its app “collects user and device information to create a unique identifier for the device of the user ”and was given two weeks to update it. its app, so that it “would comply with the App Store review guidelines within 14 days.”
At this time, it is unclear whether the major players in the mobile app space will shrink. Although Gizmodo could not confirm whether Tencent or Baidu have yet changed, as of this writing, the Bytedance developer documents list yet CAID as an optional identifier if a user’s IDFA is not available.
We contacted Apple for feedback on their app and will be updated if we find out again.