A month after Apple started cutting off companies that follow people around the web in its Safari browser to target them with ads, the company has finally explained itself.
The engineers behind the browser laid it out in a blog post on Monday (October 19). When someone types their email address into a website, to log in or sign up for a newsletter, a company working with that site can receive it and convert it into an ID. That ID lets advertisers recognize the same person across different sites without using cookies. Apple wants that stopped. LiveRamp, ID5 and The Trade Desk’s UID 2.0 all work this way so there’s little doubt now about who the block was meant for.
All of them were among the first companies Safari cut off when Apple rolled out its latest software update in September, along with Permutive and Audigent. Apple’s blog post confirms the block reaches beyond iPhones and iPads to Macs and its Vision Pro headset. Once someone updates, Safari stops talking to those companies altogether and the tracking stops with it.
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