Is Apple harvesting adtech data?

Apple's privacy data manifest is a declaration an app makes about its own data behaviour, and it has four parts: whether the app tracks users at all; which types of data it collects, chosen from a list of fourteen plus anything custom; which outside internet domains it connects to for tracking; and a stated reason for the iPhone system functions it reaches into. One filing on its own is dull paperwork. Gathered across the in-app advertising ecosystem, the filings become a description of who tracks whom, with what, and where the data goes afterwards.

The strategic reading comes from a Digiday video, which framed it as: it's our turn to track The Trackers. The view here is that the video is a brilliant depiction of Apple's strategy, collecting vast metadata across publishers, media owners and the vendors whose code handles ad tracking, segmentation and measurement. The payoff is left deliberately loose: you can only start to imagine how valuable that data would be for analysis before Apple makes its final privacy move. That is a suggestion, not an accusation. The claim placed alongside it is that this metadata will paint a true picture of in-app advertising's tracking and disable the covert tracking, called fingerprinting, done by bad actors.

The rule underneath all this is App Tracking Transparency, a feature introduced in the iOS 14.5 release of Apple's phone software. It requires an app to get explicit permission before tracking what someone does across other companies' apps and websites, asked through a prompt that lets the user permit or deny. What hangs on the answer is the Identifier for Advertisers: a unique device identifier used to follow a person's interactions across different apps and websites, and treated as crucial for targeted advertising and performance measurement. Say no, and access to that identifier is restricted. One consent question sits in front of the entire measurement chain.

The businesses in the frame are software development kit vendors: companies that supply ready-made bundles of code that app makers drop in to handle advertising, attribution and analytics. Without consent, those kits get restricted access to the identifier they relied on, which hampers targeting and complicates measuring whether advertising worked at all. For vendors whose revenue rests on detailed user data, that could hit the business model, not just the feature list. The suggested responses are all reroutes: contextual advertising that does not depend on personal data, new metrics for engagement and effectiveness, stronger anonymisation, helping apps make more of the first-party data they collect themselves, and revenue lines less tied to tracking.

Two practical constraints close it out. Adherence to Apple's privacy guidelines is critical, because apps that fall short can be rejected from the App Store, which damages the vendor and its client apps at the same time. And Apple's rules sit on top of privacy regulation elsewhere in the world, which vendors still have to satisfy separately. The honest limit is scope: these are one company's rules for its own platform. That other platforms and regulators follow the precedent is offered as something that might happen, not something that already has.