About two in five consumers will allow apps to track them in iOS 14, according to a recent survey of smartphone owners. Over 60%, however, will not allow apps to track them, and that will decrease global ad personalization capability by 44% as soon as Apple releases the next version of its mobile operating system.
The most likely to allow tracking?
Middle-aged men.
I ran a survey of 600 smartphone owners in early February. The goal: understand how Apple’s privacy changes in iOS 14, which will require each app to explicitly ask for permission to track users, will impact iPhone owners’ behavior. App publishers and marketers track users using Apple’s identifier for advertisers, the IDFA, and it helps them understand where people come from, what their interests are, and what ads might be appealing to them. But it is a significant privacy risk, and it enables both adtech platforms as well as major social networks to amass huge amounts of consumer data that can be cross-referenced with offline and first-party data to build massive identity graphs.