Apple’s privacy update targets ad tech, email marketing
Tech giant, Apple is introducing a round of privacy features which will put more limitations around email marketing and in-app advertising.
As part of its iOS 15 software update, the company will introduce Mail Privacy Protection for the Apple mail app. This prevents senders from knowing whether a user open an email, and it will hide IP addresses so that senders can’t link that action to other online activity or determine a user’s location.
Apple disclosed: “In the Mail app, Mail Privacy Protection stops senders from using invisible pixels to collect information about the user. The new feature helps users prevent senders from knowing when they open an email, and masks their IP address so it can’t be linked to other online activity or used to determine their location.”
With the big tech’s new App Privacy Report, iPhone users can see how often each app has used the permission they’ve previously granted to access their location, photos, camera, microphone, and contacts during the past seven days.1 Users can check whether this makes sense to them, and take action by going to the app in Settings if it doesn’t. Users can also find out with whom their data may be shared by seeing all the third-party domains an app is contacting.
The iPhone maker said: “For a number of years, Intelligent Tracking Prevention has helped protect Safari users from unwanted tracking by using on-device machine learning to stop trackers while allowing websites to function normally. This year, Intelligent Tracking Prevention is getting even stronger by also hiding the user’s IP address from trackers. This means they can’t utilize the user’s IP address as a unique identifier to connect their activity across websites and build a profile about them.”
This development follows the introduction of Apple’s App Tracking Transparency (ATT) framework, which is set to significantly disrupt the $105 billion U.S. mobile-ad industry. ATT forces apps to ask users permission to be tracked across other apps and websites. The privacy features announced at WWDC continue Apple’s stated push of giving users transparency and control over their information.
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