Earlier this week, stories emerged that some advertising groups in China were coming up with their own ideas. smart solutions for the new anti-detection technology that Apple is also coming up with upcoming versions of iOS 14. It looks like Apple is fighting back.
On Thursday, the Financial Times report that Apple sent alerts to at least two Chinese apps that were caught creating their own unique identifiers for a given app – something that the Apple update pretty much explicitly forbids.
The two programs involved were captured using something called the China Advertising Association ID (CAID for short), developed by the region’s trade association of the same name at the end of 2020 as a way to keep track and target iPhone users long after Apple’s updates went into effect. The Financial Times first the news announced that allegedly some of China’s largest technology companies – such as Baidu, Tencent and Bytedance – conducted tests to implement the identifier. Together, these three digital giants have reportedly control about 54% of China’s total advertising spend.
It is unclear what the Apple updates will do to the billions of dollars spent. Here in the U.S., we know that some major players in the advertising market – especially Facebook – have forecast some kind of significant revenue drop from iOS updated and continued with a public PR spree the past few months to defend their core business against Apple’s claws.
We wrote ‘a little about what these updates have entailed in the past – and why Facebook is offensive – but at the most basic level, the update simply requires apps to ask users permission before using a specific ad identifier (their so-called IDFA), which is baked into their phone. Without IDFA access, these app devices do not have the ability to track users outside of their own app, which, as you can imagine, is pretty bad news for the companies withdrawing from the bank. do exactly that. Some of them have been trying to find their own ways to undermine the new Apple rules, there is actually some fairly strict guidelines virtually everyone forbids: no “fingerprints, “none guest data, and create no own identifications.
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This seems to be what some of these China-based companies are trying to do. For example, TikTok’s parent company ByteDance uses an adtech platform called Ocean Engine to keep identifications such as an IMEI and hardware specifications of a phone, both of which are used to assign a unique CAID to the phone. If you go to the privacy conditions for the CAID, it notes that this identifier is then designed to be stored on a server in the Advertising Association itself, which means that any app that uses the Association’s built-in code can call back that ID to market to those use their specific app.
If it sounds like it’s a violation of Apple’s strict guidelines, it’s because it’s absolute. But as the initial Financial Times points out that Apple is not yet inexplicable suppress the CAID, or any applications that implement it. At least so far – according to the Times – one developer caught sneaking it into the code has reported that Apple has found that their app collects user and device information to create a unique identifier for the user’s device create ‘, and have two weeks to update their app so that it meets the App Store review guidelines within 14 days.
At the moment, it is unclear whether the key players will turn up in the space for mobile applications. While Gizmodo has not yet been able to confirm whether Tencent or Baidu has just emerged, Bytedance’s development documents are currently being written. still list the CAID as an optional identifier if a user’s IDFA is not available.
We asked Apple for comment on its application and will update when we hear back.