Approximate Location Will Hide Your Exact Location

Based on the details that Apple has given, Approximate Location is a new tool that can be enabled in iOS. Instead of switching off location-based data, this feature will make it…fuzzy. Apple reports that it will limit the location data sent to apps to a general 10-mile region.

You could be anywhere in that 10 miles, doing anything, but apps will only be able to tell that your device is in that specific region. This is going to change several important things about apps that want to know your location, but is a big boon for privacy while still enabling various app services.

Limited Data About Movement Will Be Shared

Not all the details are certain yet, but we do know that apps will be able to track when a device moves from one region to another. Apps will probably be able to extrapolate on that data and know that you were somewhere along a particular border between one region and another.

However, companies still won’t be able to tell what exactly you were doing near the border, or how long you stayed near the border before crossing over. If you cross over the same borders a lot, then apps will probably be able to make some basic guesses, like you’re commuting to work, dropping kids off at school, or visiting a preferred shopping center, but that’s basically all they will be able to tell.

Some Apps Won’t Have a Problem with This

For many third-party app services, these new 10-mile Approximate Location Regions won’t pose much of a problem. Apps that are recommending nearby restaurants you might like, parks you can visit, available hotels, and similar suggestions don’t need to know your exact location to be accurate – the 10-mile zone should work fine. The same is true of weather apps, and a variety of other services.

But not all third-party apps are interested in location data just to offer services. They also want to use it for their own ends…and that’s where things get more complicated.

Location-Based Advertising Is up for a Challenge

A whole crowd of third-party apps want to track your exact location, not for services, but to collect important data about their users. Even common apps like Netflix tend to do this! They are tracking behavior and building user profiles that they can use for advertising purposes, or provide to advertisers interested in building these profiles themselves.

Apple has already changed other types of tracking to require permission from app users. But turning on Approximate Location is another hurdle that blocks apps from knowing exactly what users are doing. Not only does this make it more difficult to build behavioral profiles, but it also makes it hard or impossible to attribute a user visit to any specific online campaign.

There are solutions to this, but it will be a change of pace for advertisers. Apps can use Wi-Fi pings, check-in features, and purchase tracking to still get an idea of what people are doing, and where. That’ll require a lot more user involvement than before, which puts privacy in the hands of the customer.

It’s Not Clear How This Will Affect Apps That Depend on Location Tracking

Then there’s the class of apps that needs to know precise locations of users to work properly.

For example, what happens when an app wants to provide precise directions to an address after you have chosen it? Or – perhaps most likely – will alerts pop up when you try to use these services, requiring you to shut off Approximate Location to continue? We’ve already seen how this works with Apple Maps, which asks you to allow one “precise location” to help with navigation, or turn it on for the app entirely.

Then there’s the problem with ridesharing and food delivery apps. They can’t offer some their core services with Approximate Location turned on, so we can expect warnings or lockouts from these apps as well.

But even with this micromanaging, more privacy features are probably worth it.

You Will Still Get Online Ads

Apple’s change is a big one for mobile advertisers, but it doesn’t mean that ads will disappear from your iPhone. Consumers will still get ads in all the usual places on their phones. That includes in their internet browsers, and in some of the apps that they use.

The big difference is that those ads will be far less likely to be 1) personalized based on what you like doing on your phone and 2) retargeted based on the products and ads you’ve looked at before. So the ads will still appear, but they will tend to be more general in nature.

Big Platforms Will Need to Get More Creative with Tracking

Without the
IDFA option, advertising platforms face a need for more innovation. Advertising
lives off data, and Apple’s move encourages smarter data strategies.

What’s that going to look like? We’ll have to wait and see, but one potential solution is “fingerprinting” a device, or making a device profile, a lot like marketers make buyer personas. This involves gathering ancillary data about a device’s IP addresses, location, activity periods, Bluetooth, and other features, then combining it into a profile that shows how the device is being used and what that says about the user.

Another
option is to develop more ways to track “events” instead of devices. An app
event could be anything from logging on for the first time to reaching the
first level of a game, etc. By looking at events across the entire user base,
advertisers can divide users into different groups of behavior and target ads
based on what that behavior says about them.

Developers and Advertisers Will Design New Ways to Monitor Apps

Advertisers
still need app data from iOS to make effective decisions about ads. Since
individual device data is now largely out of reach for them, we’re going to
start seeing more innovation on this side, too. Companies are going to start
focusing on broad data that they do have to make plans based on what they do
know – in other words, what users are doing directly on the app itself, instead
of on the entire device.

Apple is helping with this, too: The company has announced a new SKAdNetwork platform that is essentially designed to replace some of what the IDFA program used to do. It doesn’t track individual device activity, but it does track overall interaction with apps, so creators will still know things like how many people are downloading apps, where they are downloading from, and what features are getting the most use, etc. The key will be finding ways to make intelligent ad decisions from that collective data, and looking for synergistic ways to share it with partners – something advertisers traditionally haven’t done much in the past.

Retargeting Will Refocus on Contact Information

Retargeting
is the ad tactic of showing a user products and ads they have already viewed in
the past, which makes a purchase more likely. It’s a very important part of the
sales process, but becomes more difficult when device activity can’t be
directly monitored. However, there’s another highly traditional option for retargeting:
Getting a customer’s contact information. Depending on how active someone is on
the Web, something like an email address or phone number can provide plenty of
useful retargeting data. Expect a renewed focus on web forms and collecting
contact information within apps.

Online Point of Sale Will Become Even More Important

The online shopping cart is already a locus of valuable information: Every time you add a product, look at shipping prices, abandon a shopping cart, pick a payment method, choose an address, and complete an order – all of it provides companies with data they can use for retargeting, customer profiles, personalized ads and discounts, and so on.

Nothing Apple is doing will affect online POS data, so we can expect it to become even more important. However, most POS data currently stays in house, so the big question is if – and how – large ad platforms might use it in the future. Which brings us to another important point: auctioning data.

Auctioning Mobile User Data Is Less Viable Than Ever

A big secondary market for mobile advertising is selling device data to other advertisers (it’s also technically a black market when it happens on the dark web with stolen data, but there’s a legitimate version, too). Now bids for iOS data don’t really have anywhere to go – how can you bid on a list of device use information when that data isn’t being collected anymore? And if someone is selling that data, how do you know if it’s not outdated or just fake?

These secondary auction markets and “demand-side platforms” (DSPs) have been facing pressure in recent years over fears they aren’t exactly healthy for the industry. Apple nixing the IDFA won’t end them, but it will refocus the secondary selling on top-level data (the kind we discussed in the points above) and less on more personal user data.

This Is Just the Beginning

The era of
device tracking has only begun to change. Apple’s decision about IDFA was expected,
and is only the beginning of the shift away from this tactic. Google is also expected
to make a similar change with its own version of the technology, GAID (Google
Ad Identifier). Meanwhile, major web browsers like Safari and Chrome are
dropping support for third-party cookies as well.

This is great
for customer privacy, which is clearly a new core concern for the big tech
names. It’s also ushering in a new age of marketing where advertisers will have
to grapple with unseen data – and find new ways to move ahead. In some ways, it’s
an analyst’s dream come true.