"Apple is a 2 trillion-dollar company that is making it HARDER for advertisers to make money!" Well, that is how tech titan Facebook portrays recent changes in iPhone's iOS 14.5 Privacy update. You might be surprised to hear this news in my blog and are probably thinking "So what?". Let me tell you why privacy changes with iPhone matters for our wallets.

To sum up the story - Apple updated its privacy policies for iPhone, prohibiting apps to share their user's information with a third party. Essentially, Apple gives the user an option to refuse to give up their personal information to advertisers and app developers. So, what exactly IS the problem?

The problem is - by tightening privacy Apple makes it harder to advertise. For example, it ruins the idea of targeted advertisement in iPhone apps. In addition, such parameters as user location, advertising ID and other identifiers are locked from third parties. Although the "ask app not to track" feature is aimed at giving more control of the personal information to the iPhone user and has been praised by multiple privacy advocates, this feature gained multiple criticisms from multiple ad tech companies. While it is too early to say now if Apple's initiative is going to actively harm your business, there are some things to consider.

First, Apple's option to refuse to share a user's unique advertising ID might hurt small business owners that rely on personalized ads to find their customers. Facebook, one of the biggest critics of the new privacy policies stated that according to their research, small businesses are likely to make 60% less money with the implementation of the "ask app not to track" policy.

Second, Apple's crackdown on the targeted advertisement will most likely result in rising advertisement costs from tech ad companies. This might directly affect your business since it will be harder for you to acquire customer's information AND you will have to pay more for it.

Third, "ask app not to track" forces the advertisement industry to segment. There were multiple reports that blog tech guys are working on their own data services (i.e. Facebook Watch tv service) to retain customer data. At worst, this will cause businesses to develop their campaigns specifically for one cluster of apps or services, without its interaction with other brands. This will likely raise advertisement costs for the business even more due to further segmentation of customer's data. At best, "ask app not to track" is just making it harder for the customer to find your business and will add some frustration for everyone in the industry.

Despite massive differences in opinion, it is clear that the time of unlimited tracking of the user through multiple platforms is passing. Apple is a titan of a company, and it is fully capable of making other hardware and software producers move toward more strict privacy policies in their products. Apple is famous for being a trend-setter for a reason.

Make sure to check Part 2 of this blog. I will tell you more about Apple's privacy policies in the upcoming iOS 15 and how you can guard your business against them.

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