Snap has explored how it can circumvent Apple’s new App Tracking Transparency privacy rules, in a move that may trigger the wrath of Apple, Financial Times reports, citing “several people familiar with the situation.” Apple is expected to introduce its privacy rules in the coming weeks with the release of iOS 14.5, iPadOS 14.5, and tvOS 14.5.
A mobile measurement partner (MMP), AppLovin’s Adjust, has publicly told clients it can leverage “proprietary technology” to conduct probabilistic matching with 95 percent accuracy, FT reports.
Patrick McGee and Hannah Murphy for Financial Times:
According to recent internal documents seen by the Financial Times, Snap wanted to gather data from companies that analyse whether people have responded to ad campaigns, including aggregated IP addresses, the labels that identify devices connected to the internet.
It hoped it could take that data and cross-reference it against the information it holds on its own users to identify and track them, in a technique known as “probabilistic matching”, according to several people familiar with its plans.
After being contacted by the FT about its plans, Snap acknowledged it had run a probabilistic matching programme for several months to test the impact of Apple’s new policies, but said it had always intended to discontinue the program after Apple introduces its changes, as such a system would not be compliant…
The success of Apple’s new policies is likely to rest on its ability to discover and close down the nimble workarounds devised by mobile developers and advertisers… On Thursday, Apple started warning developers against probabilistic matching, and sending letters saying they should remove any code “that support this functionality.”
MacDailyNews Take: Apple’s App Tracking Transparency release will begin a nice game of whack-a-mole.