While Apple’s YouTube channel is primarily a lot of marketing for products and such, sometimes the company takes the time to talk about something else. Like a feature baked into the latest update to iOS 14, for instance.
And indeed, that’s what’s happening here. Apple updated its official YouTube channel to share the newest update on its effort to help users trumpet their own privacy and data security. To help with that, there’s the new App Tracking Transparency (ATT) feature, which Craig Federighi just spoke to The Wall Street Journal about.
But apparently Apple wanted to offer a bit more context to the feature now that it’s live and out there in the wild. The new video is just under two minutes in length, and it talks all about the new ATT feature, and, mostly, why it’s important for the user.
Here’s Apple’s attached description with the video today:
App Tracking Transparency lets you control which apps are allowed to track your activity across other companies’ apps and websites.
And, for the record, here is what Apple describes as tracking that must require an opt-in choice for users:
- Displaying targeted advertisements in your app based on user data collected from apps and websites owned by other companies.
- Sharing device location data or email lists with a data broker.
- Sharing a list of emails, advertising IDs, or other IDs with a third-party advertising network that uses that information to retarget those users in other developers’ apps or to find similar users.
- Placing a third-party SDK in your app that combines user data from your app with user data from other developers’ apps to target advertising or measure advertising efficiency, even if you don’t use the SDK for these purposes. For example, using an analytics SDK that repurposes the data it collects from your app to enable targeted advertising in other developers’ apps.
With the new feature, developers are no longer able to track the advertising identifier on your iPhone, iPad, or even on the Apple TV. That is, unless they get your explicit permission to do so. And when an app that does handle any of that tracking is available on your device, it must offer up a pop-up to inform you that it wants to track that information. From there, each user will be able to take a zeroed-in approach to either allow or block apps from tracking their data.
Unsurprisingly, the video’s narrator echoes Federighi’s –and Apple’s– resolute belief that this new feature is all about the user’s choice.
What do you think of the new App Tracking Transparency feature? Think it’s a good add for Apple’s products?