I know it impacts advertisers ability to target, but would love a clearer explanation of how it works and the impact.
In: Technology
Here’s a slightly deeper and wider explanation (ELI8):
Let’s talk apps first.
Your Apple phone is given a unique ID in the factory. This number is unique to your phone like a license plate number or a Social Security or National ID number.
If you open the Facebook App, the Facebook app reads your unique ID number and everything you do in Facebook App is reported back to Facebook with your unique ID. So, if your ID is 2399, Facebook App will tell Facebook say that 2399 is looking at puppy pictures.
Now, if you click on an ad for a Puppy Game the app store will load the Puppy Game, and you install the Puppy Game. When you buy something in the Puppy Game, the Puppy Game tells Facebook: Hey, 2399 just spent money on the Puppy Game! Facebook now knows that 2399 really likes Puppies from information across multiple apps.
Now, Apple doesn’t like apps sharing info. So, instead of telling Facebook your ID is 2399 and telling Puppy Game your ID is 2399, it tells Facebook your ID is 5522 and it tells Puppy Game your ID is 999. Apple knows that 5522 is just an alias for 2399 and that 999 is just an alias for 2399. But to Puppy Game and Facebook apps, 5522 and 999 are different people!
Now your data is more “private” in that two apps can’t share info anymore. Of course, if you log into your Facebook account on both Facebook and Puppy Game, Facebook can now figure out that 5522 and 999 are the same person because you use the same email address and password on both apps and both apps tell Facebook.
In browsers, the idea is similar except instead of Apple providing the ID for your browser, 3rd party sites leave a cookie (basically just a blob of data) on your browser, which acts as the 3rd party’s ID for you. Every website that wants to can look at the cookie and send that cookie back to the website. If two cookies match, then the websites can tell you are the same person. Apple’s tech will do the same thing as for the apps, which is that you can leave a cookie for your website, but Apple will choose the cookie, and you can only get the cookie for your website, and that cookie will be different for other websites so various websites can’t tell you are the same person. Or the user can disallow cookies altogether.
Of course, if you login to a different websites using your email address or Facebook Login, the different websites can tell you are the same person! So, Apple’s move basically prevents websites from stealthily knowing you are the same person. There are many ways you can explicitly tell the site who you are without really know it.
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