“Apple says it cares a lot about privacy,” Mark Bergen reports for Re/code. “Hence, its new iOS 9 operating system will boast a new feature, called App Transport Security, or ATS, which is supposed to require iPhone app developers to use an advanced security protocol. The idea is to keep the operating system lock tight.”
“But Google also says that not every app developer and mobile publisher will be able to work with Apple’s new standards, at least not yet,” Bergen reports. “So, when those app publishers that aren’t running the protocol meet Apple’s new encryption, their mobile ads won’t run. No ads, less revenue.”
“On Wednesday, Google gave publishers a pointer,” Bergen reports. “It published the five lines of code to disable Apple’s encryption, offering them a ‘short-term fix’ before they get up to speed with the security rules that both Apple and Google are pushing. (It should be noted: Disabling the protocol doesn’t appear to violate Apple’s rules.)”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Note: In an update, Google’s Tristan Emrich (Mobile Ads Developer Relations) wrote:
We’ve received important feedback about this post and wanted to clarify a few points. We wrote this because developers asked us about resources available to them for the upcoming iOS 9 release, and we wanted to outline some options. To be clear, developers should only consider disabling ATS if other approaches to comply with ATS standards are unsuccessful. Apple has provided a tech note describing different approaches, including the ability to selectively enable ATS for a list of provided HTTPS sites.
We’ve strongly advocated for HTTPS protection for many years and we continue to roll it out across our products.