Advertising technology firm Criteo, one of the giants in the industry, says that the Intelligent Tracking Prevention (ITP) characteristic for Safari, which holds 15% of the global browser market, is expected to cut its 2018 income by more than a fifth correlated to projections made before ITP was published.
With annual income in 2016 topping $730m, the overall cost of the privacy feature on just one organization is likely to be in the hundreds of millions of dollars.
Dennis Buchheim, the general manager of the Interactive Advertising Bureau’s Tech Lab, said that the feature would influence the industry widely.
“We expect a range of corporations is facing similar adverse impacts from Apple’s Safari tracking changes. Moreover, we expect that Apple will retain ITP and evolve it over time as they see fit,” Buchheim told the News.
“There will surely be some continued struggles to ‘outwit’ ITP, but we promote more sustainable, responsible plans in the short-term,” Buchheim added. “We also want to work beyond the industry ideally including Apple longer-term to approach more robust, cross-device advertisement targeting and measurement abilities that are also consumer friendly.”
Its launch sparked accusations from the advertising industry, which called ITP “sabotage”. An open letter signed by six promoting trade bodies called on Apple “to rethink its plan …disrupting the valuable digital broadcasting ecosystem that funds much of today’s digital content and services.”
It also accused the business of ignoring internet standards, which say that a cookie should remain on a machine until it expires naturally or is manually removed by a user. Preferably, the industry said, Apple is replacing those standards “with an amorphous set of driving rules that will hurt the user experience and undermine the economic model for the internet”.
In response, Apple noted that: “Ad tracking technology has become so pervasive that it is desirable for ad tracking companies to recreate the bulk of a person’s web browsing history. This information is gathered without permission and is used for ad re-targeting, which is how ads follow people around the internet.”
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