Apple's forthcoming Privacy and Security Centric iOS 14 Update has Media and Ad owners, and their Ad Platform suppliers worried

We’ve known about Apple’s incoming iOS and general operating ecosystem changes for a while now - and have reported the key points in our fairly recent Privacy Details and Tracking Permissions article. Apple is very much doing the right thing for customers and customer protections here in fully properly incorporating ’Explicit Consent’, and privacy first principles into every part of its operation.

For far too long unscrupulous Advertisers, Trackers and Platforms have surreptitiously tracked and leveraged customer privacy data and browsing behaviour. The 3rd Party Cookie system has been abused for far too long - and it’s admirable that Apple and Mozilla in particular are doing something about this - and granting their customers the protections they so deserve.

Serial exploiters of Customer Privacy - like Facebook and Mail Online (who turn a blind eye to it) are threatening to boycott Apple, potentially removing their Apps from the Apple ecosystem.

For too long though have parts of the Internet been like the Wild Wild West - and despite many serial offenders having been fined and sanctioned several times - they still continue to abuse customer trust and privacy details.

Facebook, Some Media Owners and Google have all been guilty of Privacy Violations

Unfortunately Google is another company continuously in the sights of privacy advocates and regulators for its privacy abuses. These are both overt and covert. It is the slowest to adopt privacy measures which might impact its ad business at the expense of users privacy and security.

Facebook also has been one of the worst offenders in consumer exploitation - in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal and similar but lesser cases, it still continues to breech consumer confidence. Facebook has overwhelming market supremacy and should use that to protect its users where possible, something it still struggles with.

Facebook and Mail Online are taking it for granted that they will maintain their market supremacy - but as Covid-19 has shown - society does evolve quickly when faced by new challenges and opportunities, and consumer behaviour changes in line with evolved perceptions and paradigm shifts.

Apple taking the Lead in Privacy Protection on the OS level

Apple has stepped in while the abuses are still rampant - and various official bodies and obudsmen are still regularly fining these companies for surreptitiously exploiting and selling on customer details - including their contact books and calendars. GDPR has had some success in curbing some of the worst excesses, but legitimate interest is often used too freely, and in practice there are no penalties for privacy violations for the vast majority of incidents and organisations.

We applaud Apple and Mozilla’s actions - and hope this will become the next battleground in customer service - where all customer-centric companies will be compelled to follow their lead.

Governments have made some inroads in trying to supervise and control privacy violations - but their legal and enforcement frameworks and enforcement bodies have in the main proved ineffective. And despite the threat of some significantly large fines - very few if any of those have actually been levied. In fact it’s only really the EU, and individual EU countries which has been diligent in holding some of these bigger serial abusers to account - and some significant fines and punishments have been handed out by them.

Privacy and Security at the Core

Affino has always married conscientious customer care with the need for businesses to have multiple revenue streams. The focus of Affino’s ecosystem is empowerment and productivity - for service providers and their consumers. The Affino ecosystem is set up to afford the most consumer protections - while still providing the most effective revenue streams for businesses - we just keep everything self contained - and protect the ecosystem from exploitation by 3rd parties.

If a company cares about its customers it will follow Apple’s and Mozilla’s lead, and we hope the other major OS provides follow Apple’s example and bake privacy protection into every part of their service.