The marketing community expects tougher policy enforcement in programs like Private Realy, Apple’s way of hiding IP addresses which are internet signals that marketers use to track consumers across the web. Apple might create even more opportunities for its ad business. Developers will have to go through Apple to run effective campaigns on its devices.
“The likelihood is pretty high that Apple is going to announce something around Private Relay being always on,” said Charles Manning, CEO of mobile ad measurement firm Kochava.
“The likelihood is pretty high that Apple is going to announce something around Private Relay being always on,” said Charles Manning, CEO of mobile ad measurement firm Kochava.
“Turning it on for everything by default,” Paparo said, “makes IP addresses useless for advertising purposes, and they are widely used right now,” said Ari Paparo, CEO of Marketecture Media.
“I wouldn’t say it’s a significant amount of traffic, but we’re seeing an increase in users running that Private Relay,” said Eric Hochberger, CEO of Mediavine, an ad management platform that works with publishers. “That’s the end of a lot of fingerprinting, a lot of household matching, and it’s going to end a lot of things that advertisers have come to rely on.”
If an advertiser links its own ID to a particular device, it could keep targeting ads. However, Apple has a policy against fingerprinting but no way of enforcing it, based on marketing tech experts. Private Relay could be Apple’s way of enforcement so that it cuts data at the source because it hides IP addresses.
Private Relay was launched in 2021 but was reserved for iCloud subscribers making those users’ IP addresses private whenever they visited websites on Safari. Interestingly, more traffic comes from users using Private Relay, and the anonymity lowers the interest in advertisers because they cannot efficiently target ads to those visitors.
These changes may disrupt the mobile marketing ecosystem posing a challenge for the largest internet ad companies such as Snap, Meta, Twitter and TikTok to generate revenue from their apps. Meta has been vocal about Apple’s policy changes and how they affect its business.