According to TechCrunch, Apple is delaying their new anti-tracking features. Instead of shipping with iOS 14, it will ship in an update early next year.
Expected out later this year, iOS 14 will contain a new prompt that asks users whether they would like to opt into this kind of targeted ad tracking. Developers will be able to integrate this prompt into their apps as soon as iOS 14 is released, but they will not be required to, as Apple indicated they would earlier.
Apple won’t force developers to let users opt out of tracking until next year – TechCrunch. (2020, September 3). TechCrunch. https://techcrunch.com/2020/09/03/apple-delay-ios-14-privacy-ad-tracking/
This is bad news for privacy-concerned individuals. Even though Apple already has some of the strongest privacy protections on the market, and shipping in the first calendar quarter of 2021 isn’t that long of a delay, every day a little more damage is done to your privacy.
Over on Daring Fireball, John Gruber doesn’t mince words (though the emphasis is mine):
The entitlement of these fuckers is just off the charts. They have zero right, none, to the tracking they’ve been getting away with. We, as a society, have implicitly accepted it because we never really noticed it. You, the user, have no way of seeing it happen. Our brains are naturally attuned to detect and viscerally reject, with outrage and alarm, real-world intrusions into our privacy. Real-world marketers could never get away with tracking us like online marketers do.
Online privacy should be modeled on real-world privacy. (2020, September 3). Daring Fireball. https://daringfireball.net/2020/09/online_privacy_real_world_privacy
Gruber’s writing on this is terrific and you should read it in its entirety. There are some great real-world analogies. The bit I’ve emphasized is totally the right response to this, and the delay makes me angry. I think everyone should be concerned over this. Every day these fuckers get a little more data about you and it needs to stop.
I’m really curious to know if there are technical problems with this, or if Apple is just giving advertisers more time to adapt. If it’s the latter, they won’t. It’s in advertisers’ best interest to drag their feet as long as possible on this.