Craig Federighi, Chief Software Officer of Apple, defends the transparency feature of application tracking

Following Apple’s confirmation that it is still planning to introduce a new application tracking transparency feature that will let users know when companies want to track them across apps and websites, which has sparked criticism from On behalf of companies such as Facebook, Craig Federighi explained in more detail the rationale behind the change in The independent.

The Application Tracking Transparency feature allows users to turn off data collection and choose whether advertisers can track their activity. While it was initially supposed to arrive with iOS 14 earlier this year, Apple has postponed the feature until early 2021 to give developers more time to adapt it.

Federighi said The independent that the new feature can be attributed to Apple’s support for privacy as a “core value” that has been present “since the start of the business,” citing how Steve Jobs highlighted Apple II’s ability to enable users to secure their own information on floppy disks and control their data.

He said the feature would ultimately be “better for people who sometimes protest these moves,” because it increases trust between users, developers and advertisers. Federighi also said that similar concerns had been raised in the past about new privacy features, but they didn’t lead to long-term issues and eventually became mainstream in the industry:

We introduced smart tracking prevention several years ago, and at the time, parts of the advertising industry were saying that the sky was going to crumble and their business was going to be destroyed by the fact that they couldn’t follow everyone. from website to website to website. Well, actually if you look at what happened to the industry, it didn’t happen at all, and yet we also protected user privacy.

Federighi also noted that Apple was not the biggest manufacturer in most markets and implied that customers could choose whether or not to buy an Apple device:

If we sell cars without airbags, and we decide to install airbags in our cars before someone else does, and customers want to buy them, I think it’s great that we have made that choice. We don’t wait for someone to ask us to do it, we make that part of what it means to use our platform.

Federighi confirmed that Apple’s decision to postpone the feature was singularly due to the concerns of some developers who feared that removing ad tracking would impact how their apps work, rather than conflict with the ad industry. .

Although Apple has not announced any other privacy protection features that may affect the advertising industry, Federighi said, “We’re going to watch and see what happens and try to make sure we can keep the ecosystem healthy, ”suggesting that more changes may be made in the future.

Finally, Federighi highlighted some of Apple’s privacy features that have benefited users in the past, while preserving the needs of the advertising industry. He specifically mentioned the SKAdNetwork tool, which allows developers to track when an ad leads to the sale of a product, which has become a key metric for many advertisers, saying, “We have created a framework for do so in a way that protects your privacy. “

Future updates, he said, could bring more ways for the advertising industry to “improve its ability to advertise effectively while maintaining privacy, and we want to work technically on solutions. to make it more and more efficient “.

Read the full interview on The independent.