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Marketing on Platforms
Apple finally explains its Safari block, and identity companies are in its sights
A month after Apple started cutting off companies that follow people around the web in its Safari browser to target them with ads, the company has finally explained itself.
The engineers behind the browser laid it out in a blog post on Monday (October 19). When someone types their email address into a website, to log in or sign up for a newsletter, a company working with that site can receive it and convert it into an ID. That ID lets advertisers recognize the same person across different sites without using cookies. Apple wants that stopped. LiveRamp, ID5 and The Trade Desk’s UID 2.0 all work this way so there’s little doubt now about who the block was meant for.
All of them were among the first companies Safari cut off when Apple rolled out its latest software update in September, along with Permutive and Audigent. Apple’s blog post confirms the block reaches beyond iPhones and iPads to Macs and its Vision Pro headset. Once someone updates, Safari stops talking to those companies altogether and the tracking stops with it.
Apple’s reasoning, according to the blog, is that email addresses have taken the place of cookies as the thing tracking hinges on. It happened after Apple blocked cookies from following people across sites in the Safari browser six years ago. Parts of the industry went looking for a replacement until they found one. Apple doesn’t think much of the companies that did. They sit unseen on pages where people type in their email, it wrote in the post, and since most people hang on to one address for years and use it on every device they own, the tracking that follows is far harder to shake than a cookie ever was.
Logging out of a site or unsubscribing from a newsletter doesn’t help either, Apple wrote in the blog, since the third party keeps the tracking code and the email address regardless. Over time, the third-party builds on what it’s kept. Every login and form adds another detail, until it has a profile of each person, which the industry calls an identity graph. Nobody signing up for a newsletter, Apple argued, expects their details to be handed to a third party for something else entirely.
Hence the bluntness of the block. Safari shuts out the whole web address of any company it targets, so fiddling with how a request is built won’t sneak it through.
The questions Apple didn’t answer
Apple is clear about why it’s going after this kind of tracking. What it means for publishers is murkier. The company said a business personalizing things for its own customers isn;t tracking and isn’t what the block is for. For a publisher, that would cover using what it knows about its own readers to recommend articles or tailor its pages. Where Apple draws the line is the outside firms publishers often pay to match the data up. Even when every detail comes from a single company’s own customers. Apple wrote, those firms can still link the same person across different sites, which no single site could do alone.
That describes a fair few of the companies publishers rely on to make their readers more valuable to advertisers. Which of those vendors Apple has in mind is one of several things the post doesn’t say. It doesn’t name a single company, explain how one ends up on Apple’s list or say how it could get off it. The answers matter because Apple’s list has already caught at least one company by mistake. The Trade Desk’s ad server, the tech that puts its winning ads on a reader’s screen, was blocked alongside its UID 2.0 identifier in the first days of the update. It has since been switched back on after being caught up by accident, according to a person with knowledge of the matter.
For now, the block has caught only a handful of companies. Digiday’s own testing found most of the ad tech web addresses it checked were still loading. Apple’s post makes it clear it doesn’t plan to stop there, however. “We’ll continue to prevent covert and cross-site tracking by default,” it wrote.
Apple’s track record
However clearly Apple spells out why its going third far to stop its customers being tracked, some in the ad industry will still suspect it has another motive in mind. They’ll point to its track record.
In 2017 Safari’s Intelligent Tracking Protection started stripping out the cookies ad tech companies relied on, and Criteo warned investors of a hit of up to 10% to fourth quarter revenue ex-TAC. Apple’s own Search Ads, launched the year before, ran inside the App Store where none of that applied. In 2021, App Track Transparency had most iPhone owners telling apps not to track them, and Meta put the cost at around $10 billion for 2022. Apple’s share of the iPhone app install ad market went from 17% to 58% over the same stretch, according to Branch data reported by the Financial Times. A year after that, with rivals still working out what ATT had cost them, Apple started selling ads on the App Store’s Today’s tab and on individual app pages.
This time, Safari’s block has landed as Apple’s own ads business is pushing into Maps and hiring on a scale it rarely has before.
Apple has 86 open roles tagged Apple Ads, though plenty of those listings predate the block by months, which suggest a buildout planned well in advance. Asked about the hiring push, Apple pointed to its blog post and declined to comment further,Whatever the reason for it, an ads team hiring on that scale is one with growth in mind. Ad execs will be watching closely for what those plans turn out to be.
In Cupertino it’s hiring a director of algorithms for ads engineering and, as of October 19, a product manager for AI and machine learning in the Apple Ads marketplace, along with a senior ML engineer for ad campaign optimization, among its vacancies. Meanwhile in New York, home to 17 of the 86 roles, Apple wants three client partners to look after advertisers and someone to run campaign management for brand advertising. Most of the other jobs there are engineering.
Then there’s a team called Signals Intelligence. According to its listing, engineers there fine-tune language models to label and summarise ads and search queries, and those labels help decide which ads get pulled up and ranked. A product manager on the Apple Ads marketplace team in Cupertino is wanted to run the next generation of ad matching and search intent, with a job spec that reads like a glossary of semantic search. Apple never says what all of it adds up to. Instead, the postings promise to respect or protect user privacy.
With Apple saying nothing, ad execs have filled the gap with theories of their own, most of them shaped by the last time Apple changed the rules.
As one ad tech exec lead at a publisher explained: “The bigger question for publishers is not whether Apple should protect privacy. Of course they should. The question is who gets to decide what privacy-preserving advertising looks like. Apple controls the operating system, the browser engine and increasingly the technical infrastructure through which advertising reaches the user. If Apple can decide which ad-tech companies are technically allowed to communicate with Safari, it is effectively making market-access decisions.”
However this shakes out, it’s a reminder of how long a shadow Apple casts over the ad industry, whether it means to or not. Expect that shadow to stretch further. Before taking over from Tim Cook last month, John Ternus told Apple staff that services would keep growing under his leadership. That’s the part of Apple its ads business sits in.
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