Earlier this week, stories surfaced that some Chinese advertising groups were proposing their own smart solutions for the new anti-tracking technology which Apple includes with future versions of iOS 14. Now it seems that Apple is fighting.
Thursday, Financial Times reported that Apple sent warnings to at least two Chinese apps that were caught trying to create their own unique identifiers for a particular app – something Apple’s update explicitly forbids.
The two applications in question were captured using something called Chinese Advertising Association ID (CAID for short), which was developed by the region trade association of the same name at the end of 2020 as a way to continue to pursue and aim at iPhone users long after Apple updates went into effect. First of all, the Financial Times he broke the news that some of China’s largest technology companies – such as Baidu, Tencent and Bytedance – have each conducted tests to implement the identifier. Collectively, these three digital giants are reportedly reported Control about 54% in China total advertising expenses.
It’s unclear what Apple’s billions of dollars spent will translate into. Here in the U.S., we know that some of the major players in the ad serving market – especially Facebook – have forecast some kind of significant revenue is sinking from iOS update and continued a PR public spree in recent months to defend its core business from Apple’s claws.
I wrote little bit about what these updates entail – and why Facebook is offensive – in the past, but at the most basic level, the update would simply require applications to ask the user consent before using a specific ad identifier (their so-called IDFA), which is entered into their phone. Without IDFA access, these app developers don’t have the ability to track users outside of their own app, which, as you can imagine, is pretty bad news for banking companies. doing exactly that. While some of them have tried to find their own insufficient ways to reverse the new Apple rules, Are in fact some quite strict guidelines banning almost everything: no “fingerprinting,” Not date hashand without creating their own identifiers.
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It seems that this is what some of these Chinese companies have tried to do. For example, the parent company TikTok ByteDance uses an adtech platform called Ocean Engine to pick identifiers such as the IMEI and hardware specifications of a phone, both of which are then used to assign a unique CAID to the phone. If you look at Terms and conditions for CAID, notes that this identifier is then designed to be stored on a server hosted by the Advertising Association itself, which means that any application that uses the Association’s embedded code could call back that market ID for anyone using their application. private.
If it sounds like a violation of the strict guidelines here, it’s because it’s absolute. But like the original Financial Times points out, inexplicably, Apple has not yet done so suppressed CAID or any applications that implement it. At least so far – according to the Times, a developer who was caught sneaking into his code was told that Apple found that the app “collects user and device information to create a unique identifier for the user’s device.” have given two weeks to update their app so that it is “in line with the app store review guidelines within 14 days”.
At this time, it is unclear whether the major players in the mobile app space will escape. While Gizmodo has failed to confirm whether Tencent or Baidu have developed, as of this writing, developer documents Bytedance still list CAID as an optional identifier if a user’s IDFA is not available.
I contacted Apple for comments on its application and it will update if we hear back.