According to the latest reports, sources said that Apple’s director of user security and privacy functions said that he regretted developing IDFA, an iOS system advertising tracking tool that can track and lock users.
Erik Neuenschwander, who has been with Apple since 2007, reportedly became head of Apple’s product security team in 2011. He and his team developed the iOS system’s advertising identifier IDFA, which is used to track and target users.
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Since hardware-based identifiers cannot track users across devices, a team led by Nuenschwenden designed a software-based IDFA that uses identifiers embedded in the operating system to do so. The team also developed a feature that lets users turn off tracking identifiers, but most users don’t use it.
Moreover, software-based advertising identifiers have become the advertising industry norm, allowing third parties to access user data to improve the accuracy of ad delivery. Google eventually created a similar tool. The prevailing industry norm was not the original goal of Nurnschwenden and his team, the report said.
Developers started looking for loopholes in identifier rules that would allow users to continue to be tracked even if the IDFA feature was turned off. According to reports, Nurnschwenden’s team added new security policies several times in 2014 and 2016 to make it harder for developers to bypass users’ established settings in the identifier function, but developers still found ways to bypass these rules. method.
After the new rules were introduced in 2016, Nurnschwenden began telling colleagues that he regretted creating the IDFA, according to people who have worked with him. The fact that software-based identifiers have become the industry norm has particularly troubled Nurnschwenden.
Apple says it believes “privacy is a fundamental right, which is why we design every product and feature with user privacy first. Our teams work together within the protection is as hard as all of our product design, in order to provide customers with more choices and better products. In terms of how to provide users with more and more granular control, the application tracking transparency mechanism is like this A typical example.”
Apple has come under heavy criticism in recent years over antitrust concerns and how it handles user privacy. Last April, Apple made a major overhaul in how it tracks advertisers when it released an app-tracking transparency mechanism that began allowing iPhone users to choose which apps can track their activity on the web.
Furthermore, Advertisers have been hit hard by reports that a large number of users are starting to use the feature. App tracking transparency makes it more expensive for businesses to reach new customers on apps like YouTube and Snapchat.
Among them, Apple’s strategy has the greatest impact on Facebook. The change cost the company “approximately $10 billion,” the company’s chief financial officer said on an earnings call in February.
