Apple has reopened its long-running feud with ad tech over who gets to identify people on its devices and so advertisers can serve them ads.
It started when the latest software update for iPhones landed last month and The Trade Desk’s ads stopped loading in the Safari browser. Soon the industry worked out that ID5, LiveRamp, Permutive, Audigent and UID 2.0 were blocked too. The Trade Desk got a reprieve, the identity vendors didn’t and Apple stayed silent while the industry spent Advertising Week New York guessing why. This week, Apple finally came clean. In a blog post earlier this week (Oct. 19), it said the browser now cuts off network access to so-called identity resolution companies — the companies that stitch together separate scraps of data about a person — think email addresses, phone numbers, IP addresses, browsing history and even information about the device someone is using — to recognize and track them across sites and devices.
Nobody can yet say how far the damage spreads and the early fallout already looks expensive for a lot of companies. The charts below set out how the industry got here and what Apple’s move put at stake.
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