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A new report has highlighted how three top prominent executives initially found themselves at odds in early deliberations about Apple’s App Tracking Transparency framework.
According to the report from The Information, the executives who disagreed over how far Apple should go in protecting user privacy in digital advertising included Apple’s Craig Federighi, who oversees software engineering, Phil Schiller, who manages the App Store, and Eddy Cue, Apple’s head of services.
In 2020, Apple rolled out App Tracking Transparency, a feature that lets users decide whether a specific app can track them across other apps and websites.
From a technical standpoint, ATT hides a user’s identifier for advertisers, also known as IDFA, from apps that a user has not approved. Eric Neuenschwander, the birther of the identifier, began to raise concerns over IDFA and how it was being used by apps to unethically track users, according to the report.
Eventually, the ad industry began to use the IDFA in ways the privacy engineering team hadn’t intended, building an entire tracking ecosystem around it. Unscrupulous developers started using it to gather location data on users and sell that information to data brokers for additional revenue.
Around this time, Neuenschwander privately began telling colleagues he regretted creating the IDFA, in part because others like Google followed with a similar identifier a year later, according to people who have worked with him.
Even before ATT, Apple gave users the ability to enable “Limit ad tracking” in iPhone settings. The toggle, however, was buried deep in the Settings app and often untouched by users.
Neuenschwander’s team, around 2016, started to find new ways to enforce a user’s choice if they enabled “Limit ad tracking,” including out-right hiding the identifier from apps if a user had indicated they did not
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Read the original article: Report Highlights How Top Apple Executives Disagreed Over How Far iOS Anti-Tracking Measures Should Go