Recognition: Robert Triggs / Android Authority
Apple just released iOS 14.5 with a much discussed privacy feature – App Tracking Transparency. For those of you who are not familiar with it, the feature gives iPhone users a lot more control over how apps track them on the web and other companies’ apps.
Each app that requests tracking data is shown in a dedicated tracking menu. This allows iPhone users to toggle tracking permissions for individual apps on or off. When users turn off app tracking, Apple revokes the app’s access to their IDFA (Identifier For Advertisers). This will prevent the app from disclosing user activity data to third parties for ad targeting purposes.
You will also see a popup that appears when users open an app that is tracking them, as shown above.
The ultimate goal is to give users the ability to make more informed decisions about the apps they use and the permissions they give those apps. It also helps cut out unnecessary ads that users see on the internet. For example, Facebook has embedded code in millions of apps to collect data and target ads to people.
On the flip side, the anti-app tracking feature can also reduce the number of personalized ads that some people find helpful. So if you turn off app tracking for most of your apps, you might stop seeing useful ads for businesses and services that you would otherwise have discovered thanks to ad targeting.
It is also rumored that Google is working on a less stringent version of this policy. Given that it raises more than $ 100 billion annually by helping partners target ads to Android users, we’re not sure if the company will ever take an approach as rigorous as Apple’s. The implementation of the company Cupertino is so strict that if developers fail to comply, their apps can be started via the app store.
With that in mind, would you like Android to implement a similar app tracking transparency feature as well? Take our survey above and let us know what you think in the comments section below.