iOS 14.5: Only 5% of Users in US Opt-in for App Tracking

[Jet_ski]

Summary

With iOS 14.5 update Apple is forcing apps to ask users for permission to access Apple’s Identifier for Advertiser (IDFA) to track users for targeting and advertising.

 

According to Flurry Analytics since the release of iOS 14.5, of the users who have installed the update only 5% in the US and only 13% worldwide have decided to opt-in when prompted by apps for permission.

Flurry Analytics, owned by Verizon Media, is used in over 1 million mobile applications, providing aggregated insights across 2 billion mobile devices per month.

You can stop apps from asking for permission on iOS by going to Settings > Privacy > Tracking > and disable “Allow apps to request to track”

 

Quotes

Quote

With opt-in rates expected to be low, this change is expected to create challenges for personalized advertising and attribution, impacting the $189 billion mobile advertising industry worldwide. 

 

My thoughts

The fact that a company I’ve never heard of, Flurry Analytics, is installed on so many apps and tracking users is exactly why this move by Apple is so popular among consumers.

 

Flurry has a few charts that their site won’t let me copy & paste here. Worth taking a look.

 

Sources

https://www.flurry.com/blog/ios-14-5-opt-in-rate-att-restricted-app-tracking-transparency-worldwide-us-daily-latest-update/

[lieder1987]

not really surprised.

 

[Kisai]

37 minutes ago, Jet_ski said:

 

 

My thoughts

The fact that a company I’ve never heard of, Flurry Analytics, is installed on so many apps and tracking users is exactly why this move by Apple is so popular among consumers.

 

 

 

This is just "adblocking 2.0" where we've gone from people just being thieves by blocking ads (the same people who would not wear a mask in a pandemic,) to (at least Apple) where we now have a weapon against the overreach of companies (like google and facebook) who datamine your website and app telemetry so they can sell it and services designed to sell to you.

 

[Guest]

Weird how Apple have more power to stop Tik Tok sending data to you-know-where than the US government. 

[leadeater]

People don't want to be tracked? Wow I'm shocked...

[TetraSky]

More people than I expected are ok with being tracked. Honestly, all this will do, is more generic ads instead of targeted ones. Some services might start pushing "premium" subscription more, too.
(Bit scary how this one unknown company to the general public is in so many apps... The fact it's made by Yahoo apparently, doesn't help on that matter)

 

Anyone know if Google plans to... Wait nevermind, I realized how stupid that was to ask before I even finished writing it.

 

 

1 hour ago, Kisai said:

where we've gone from people just being thieves by blocking ads (the same people who would not wear a mask in a pandemic,)

Never have I seen someone reaching so hard before. Holy hell.

[Helpful Tech Witch]

7 minutes ago, TetraSky said:

Bit scary how this one unknown company to the general public is in so many apps... The fact it's made by Yahoo apparently, doesn't help on that matter)

Actually it's pretty common for statistics trackers to be built into things.

For example gs.statcounter.com is built into a lot of websites.

 

 

Though if one of these companies had a vulnerability in a update, a good chunk of the internet could be vunreable to attack.

[captain_to_fire]

3 hours ago, leadeater said:

People don't want to be tracked? Wow I'm shocked...

Inb4 Facebook charges an in-app purchase of $10 month, but Apple will take a 30% cut so in the end, Apple still got the last laugh

Edited May 9, 2021 by captain_to_fire

[bcredeur97]

no one wants to be tracked, but at the same time they wont inconvenience themselves to not be tracked. 

So it took a company to make privacy easier for them to actually go for it.

[dalekphalm]

I can personally say that I’ve requested app not to track on literally every single app that’s asked since the update. I have no intentions of changing that for future apps. 
 

I’m not entirely surprised. Even regular folks, when presented with such a clear and simple question “is it okay if this app tracks you?” will typically click “do not track”. 

[Kisai]

4 hours ago, TetraSky said:

Never have I seen someone reaching so hard before. Holy hell.

You must be young then, because ads on websites were never this intrusive until people started blocking them.

 

[RejZoR]

Here are stats from my iPhone for past 30 days. Note that I don't use ANY apps or services from Google or Facebook (I did use Amazon and one Microsoft's app hence the queries to their servers), yet look at where Google is. Most of which is analytics crap from within apps that you download on App Store. Both are filtered by my DNS filters, but the fact they still get so many queries while not being actively used by user is rather scary. Or shall I say creepy...

[Drama Lama]

9 hours ago, leadeater said:

People don't want to be tracked? Wow I'm shocked...

Almost seems like they actually care about privacy.

all it needs is a bit of press coverage and some easy adjustable options. Thought it’s not like Facebook for example can’t track your activities, they just can’t track it across multiple apps and websites. I see a bit of a problem that most consumers now think that all they have to do is adjust a few settings and then they become „anonymous“. It’s a bit like that „incognito mode makes you invisible“.

[Monkey Dust]

Is there any evidence that having all this information on people creates more effective advertising? Is there any value on targeting people with adverts beyond basing it on the website they are visiting, and the country they are visiting it from? Are Facebook and Google selling snake oil?

[TheReal1980]

 

[AMD A10-9600P]

I refuse to believe that anyone who has opted in to the invasive tracking is a real person

[Spindel]

But in some other thread on this forum commenters said that this would never be a hit and personalized ads where much better for people. 
 

#techforumsarealwayswrongaboutapple

[leadeater]

11 minutes ago, Spindel said:

on this forum commenters said

While also likely running ad blockers lol

[Arika]

25 minutes ago, Spindel said:

But in some other thread on this forum commenters said that this would never be a hit and personalized ads where much better for people. 
 

#techforumsarealwayswrongaboutapple

who the hell said that?

 

49 minutes ago, AMD A10-9600P said:

I refuse to believe that anyone who has opted in to the invasive tracking is a real person

likely just saw the popup, didn't read it and hit "agree"

[Kisai]

2 hours ago, Monkey Dust said:

Is there any evidence that having all this information on people creates more effective advertising? Is there any value on targeting people with adverts beyond basing it on the website they are visiting, and the country they are visiting it from? Are Facebook and Google selling snake oil?

Not really.

 

It makes it easier to "not waste money" on shotgunning advertising, which is what the advertisers want, not what the sites/apps/users want. 

 

Like, let's roll the clock back to the early 2000's, when website ads first appeared. People whined and complained, but they were not invasive, they were effectively identical to how newspapers did ads, where they just took up space, and at worst, people complained about the bandwidth waste. This was before most people used cell phones for internet (that would come later), billed by the kilobyte.

 

So originally you had ad banners which were 468x60 (desktops, 640x480) and some smaller ones designed for RSS feeds that were intended to be read by early PDA's.

 

Then they became 768x90, when peoples screens got bigger (1024x768), and then the 160x600 and 300x250 ads started showing up, which greedy websites being greedy, decided they would just stuff as many ads on their sites as possible, leading to the first actual adpocalypse, and Google buying doubleclick, circa 2008. Adblock began in 2009.

 

That is the demarcation point between "reasonable" and "unreasonable" ads. What everyone forgot today, was what drove this adpocalypse. x10 had been pushing these obnoxious pop-up/under ads. As soon as web browsers changed it so pop-up ads were no longer possible (*cough* at least not that way) x10 declared bankruptcy (2010).

 

Now, let's not delude ourselves, "smart" people have been blocking ads with the hosts file ever since the beginning, but their usual method for stealing content, was to literately steal the content, with page scrapers. When Mozilla added greasemonkey to firefox in 2005, a lot of browser "extensions" started being developed, one of them being adblock, that enabled all sorts of page-scraper functionality. Google's attempt to kill adblock in 2019 by changing the API didn't exactly go over well. 

 

Like what predates adblocking is script blocking, but that hasn't really worked since "web 2.0" and progressive web application type of things started replacing vanilla html experiences. You can thank, or blame, mobile phones for this change, because most "mobile" websites are 99% javascript framework garbage.

 

So what else? The iPhone came out in 2007, slotting right after the first website adpocalypse. Steve Jobs said, No Flash, and suddenly every advertiser was pissing their pants about it.

 

Because yes, at the time, 100% of web advertisements were either flash or animated gif's. Google's "text ads" were widely snubbed and nobody... NOBODY uses them, to allow them to run is to allow sub 0.01cpm ads on your site, that google will dump garbage ads on your site with. The same goes for Ad-supported android apps even today.

 

So since 2008 advertisements on the internet got worse, significantly worse, as "ad blocking" started being pushed by well-meaning nerds to their less-tech savvy friends and family, leading to an arms race of ads that were harder to block, by being more laser-targeted, and harder to filter by tools like adblock, since now most people aren't seeing the targeted ads, just the low-quality, low-paying ads, that the website owners probably got nothing for showing anyway. (If you see PSA ads (eg ones about charities, animal welfare), those are only ever shown on websites that have no paying ads.)

 

Like it has been well known the easiest way to block adblock is to poison it by having elements in the page have the same name as the ads it will block. But that also results in the site appearing broken, and raising your support costs. So the very people stealing your content are now costing you money too. Yay, that's not going to go over well to call them thieves. That has never ever worked, and often backfires and makes how to block the ads even more well known.

 

The best way to break ads tracking right now is to just straight up turn off third party cookies. No ad blocking needed.

 

This should always be the default setting. Occasionally this will break SSO's from large companies like Microsoft and Google, but that just means you have to login to sites more often that are owned by the same company.

 

You know what else websites do not get paid for? CPC ads (Cost per Click), they pay well below CPM ads and substantially below Sponsorship ads (which you shouldn't block, because they are directly supporting the site.)  CPC ads are usually stinger-type ads (outbrain and taboola show only clickbait garbage.) This is stuff that if you block, the website doesn't even notice.

 

An interesting argument by advertisers is that they actually want people to block ads, because they don't want to waste spend on people not seeing the ads anyway. So blocking the ads, is only harming the website, not the advertiser, not the product being advertised.

 

Anyhow this also doesn't get into telemetry tracking on websites and applications. This is never necessary, you are not beta-testing their site, they are not paying you for it, just block that stuff.

 

At one point Google Analytics was useful because accessing the server-sided statistics was usually unreliable, but now the reverse is true, you get more information from Webalizer than you will from GA. Webalizer can not be blocked because it processes the webserver raw log files. However the current way websites are built (with frameworks, not raw html), the stats are likely not useful other than getting some time-of-day tracking for planning maintenance. Most web browsers have stopped sending useful "finger-print" information like the browser agent. The other problem is that webalizer doesn't scale beyond one web server, and consumes performance that could be used to run the website. GA on the other hand, has an upper-limit as well. They charge you $12500/mo if your website produces more than 10,000,000 hits per month. So that's a relatively low bar. If you reverse engineer that number, you realize that you won't break even. Your website needs a 1.25CPM to break exactly even (10,000,000 * 1.25CPM = 12500.) Yet Google will rarely give such a site such a high CPM ads. Usually the CPM goes off a cliff the larger a site gets. Most of the websites I'm aware of, if there are comments or forums, the CPM drops because UGC is not brand-safe.

 

That gets to the last point.

 

Patreon.

 

If you support a site, you should be supporting it via either Patreon or Paypal tips/kofi , or by directly purchasing their merch from their store (not amazon or aliexpress.) Ads no longer pay the bills for websites, and we're going to quickly see a return to shotgunning poorly-targeted ads, so if you would rather block the ads, you better be supporting your favorite creators some other way. This was not the situation in 2008.

 

Youtube's adpocalypse(s) were just lessons not learned from 2008. (apparently there has been four since youtube's inception, 2016 (blame PDP), 2017 (which requires 1000 subs to monetize), 2019 (which resulted in comments being removed from kids-targeted content), and another 2019 regarding bullying/harassment, primarily from channels pushing hate in the first place.)

 

For Google, youtube is a very good way to datamine users, by mining what videos they comment, like and subscribe to. They don't even need ads to run on the site. For Facebook and Twitter, it's their own site. So needless to say there are only two outcomes now:

 

a) Facebook, Google, Twitter, want all the money for themselves from adspend, so you will see further restrictions coming down the line that will look like censorship, just to attract "brand-safe" advertisements to their first-party sites. They will push you to use their apps on mobile devices and on the desktop because these aren't subject to cookie and privacy rules

b) Most advertisement platforms just go extinct, and Google scales back third-party analytics and advertising platforms. This means that you will see most ad-run sites switch to subscriber models, or "use our app" to use this site for free (with curated ads.)

 

And we all know how well B worked for the newspapers.

 

 

[SADS]

Imagine how fast your devices would feel if the internet was in the state it was 10-20 years ago on todays technology.

all the tracking and data overheads gone, your pages would load in no time

[Mark Kaine]

I only have one question:  Google, when??  

[Vanderburg]

On 5/8/2021 at 3:23 PM, Jet_ski said:

You can stop apps from asking for permission on iOS by going to Settings > Privacy > Tracking > and disable “Allow apps to request to track”

I didn't realize that was there, thanks!

[AMD A10-9600P]

1 hour ago, Mark Kaine said:

I only have one question:  Google, when??  

Surely never? Don't Google make a huge profit off of advertising?

[Mark Kaine]

3 minutes ago, AMD A10-9600P said:

Surely never? Don't Google make a huge profit off of advertising?

yes, i guess, but theyre also making a huge deal out of respecting their users privacy, and im sure this new apple initiative will reflect badly on them and their practices.

 

In other words if they dont follow suit many users may say "Goodbye ad-tracking , hello lightning port!" when buying their next phone...