Apple Empowers its customers to take full control of all their Privacy Details and Tracking Permissions

All our staff at Affino have been using the Ghostery Browser Privacy plugin from the start - to be able to view exactly what 3rd Party Trackers there are on a particular page / website - and to opt out of, and screen those as appropriate.

Apple has pretty much taken Ghostery’s approach and baked it into its own Safari browser across all devices in the upcoming iOS 14, iPadOS 14 and macOS Big Sur releases, as well as its Apps environment / ecosystem. Which means that customers / users will have first hand knowledge on exactly who is trying to track them and use / abuse their details and for what purpose.

The way Apple is setting this up is that you will be opted out by default - and will need to approve each of those trackers yourself - much like giving permission to cookies on browsers. Firefox also does something very similar (and has been for a while). Another area where this makes a huge different is within the Apps environment - where for far too long rogue developers have mostly been sharing customer details and data without consent to third parties.

Apple’s Apps Ecosystem is already more secure and robust than the Android equivalent - and this will put Apple users further ahead - in terms of safety and security. It will be interesting to see what Google decides to do in this area - as it is badly conflicted by its own advertising and tracking revenue-making business models.

Facebook should really take note too - and people should be more vary of accessing Facebook Apps (Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger) and Extensions in general as their track-record has been particularly poor as regards consumer protections and exploitation vis-a-vis Cambridge Analytica, to say nothing of its unwillingness to address hate speech.

The Quickening End for JavaScript and Cookie Based Plugins

For systems that have been traditionally reliant on 3rd-party cookies and trackers though - this is very much the start of the end for them as already reported in the Internet Advertising sector with reference to ad-tracking, but the same goes for most analytics, and indeed almost the entire website plugin ecosystem (it’s worth properly understanding the implications there).

We’ve been quite surprised by just how many new Cookie and JavaScript based Applications / Software Solutions have been launched recently - in 2020 even - as these in no way take account of the new fully-Permissioned Privacy ecosystem and opt-out reality - let alone the death of 3rd party cookie support.

An important piece of information with this launch is that Safari will no longer support Adobe Flash at all. Prior to the advent of advanced JavaScript and 3rd Party Cookies, Flash apps ruled the roost. They are now entirely gone from big parts of the ecosystem. This change by Apple accelerates further the death of the current ecosystem. Website and indeed any business owner or stakeholder that is in some way reliant of these needs to quickly re-evaluate their setup and pivot to solutions which have evolved beyond the reliance on these technologies.

Affino Requires No 3rd Party Cookies

All this plays very much into the hands of our own Affino Platform and Ecosystem - where all activities are fully permissioned through Affino’s core User Preference Centre - and handled natively and locally onsite. Affino does no personalisation or profiling of non-permissioned users. Until any user registers and agrees to the terms and conditions no personal data is stored and used for targeting, with the exception of metering which presents non-personalised metering gates to users who have hit the article read limit.

If you want to explore this subject further, then let us know and we’ll be happy to organise a call / Skype / Zoom to follow up.