After the Double 11 shopping spree, I quietly limited ad tracking

This year's Double 11 was a huge success. According to statistics, the total transaction volume for the day was 120.7 billion, with mobile devices accounting for 82%. With Jack Ma's continuous education and the explosion of mobile devices, users' habit of consuming on mobile devices has become irreversible!

However, another issue that cannot be ignored is personal privacy. This involves the topic of how to collect user data. One of the most important concepts is the user identifier, which is a string of characters that is generally related to hardware, such as the user's online ID card.

If there is no online ID card, then each merchant (App) can only identify users based on its own account system and record user behavior. With a unified online ID card, the data between various merchants can be connected. Tmall not only knows the shopping data of user A on Taobao, but can also understand the user's behavior on social networks, travel preferences, etc.

You can imagine that as time goes by, the user's behavioral data on mobile devices accumulates more and more, and the user will become more and more like a transparent person. Unless they change their mobile phone, there is almost no way to resist the negative effects of this technology.

There is only one exception, Apple! Apple's uniqueness is reflected in many aspects, user privacy is one of them.

In order to protect user privacy, Apple no longer allowed players in its ecosystem to obtain users' unique identifiers as early as 2012. However, when businesses advertise on mobile devices, they want to monitor the effectiveness of each advertisement . Therefore, Apple came up with a compromise, which is to provide another set of hardware-independent identifiers for businesses to monitor advertising effectiveness. At the same time, users can change this string of characters in the settings, resulting in businesses being unable to track user behavior over the long term. This is called the Advertising Identifier (IDFA), and the setting path is "Settings->Privacy->Advertising->Reset Advertising Identifier", as shown below (iOS9)

Because this IDFA is not unique, the industry was very resistant to it at the beginning, and tried every means to obtain UDID (bound to the mobile phone and cannot be changed by the user). This angered Apple, and in 2013, all apps were banned from obtaining UDID, otherwise they could not be put on the shelves. It is precisely because of the closed nature of its ecosystem that it can force everyone to submit. Although IDFA is not unique, it is better than nothing, and not many users will change it. Therefore, after several battles, IDFA has become the universal identifier of iPhone users in the industry. I divide this process into 6 stages, summarized in the following figure:

However, after the launch of iOS10 this year, the advertising industry was shocked because Apple launched the "Limit Ad Tracking" feature, and the setting path was the same as iOS9. Careful people may have noticed that this feature is not unique to iOS 10, but also exists in previous versions. However, after actual testing, it was found that before iOS 10, even if users turned on this feature, merchants could still obtain IDFA, but it was different from before. Each time this switch was switched on, the effect was the same as clicking “Restore Advertising Identifier”. But it’s different with iOS 10. When users turn on this feature, merchants can only get a series of meaningless zeros. This is why the advertising industry is shocked!

However, it needs to be clarified that you will see the same number of ads after limiting ad tracking, but merchants will not be able to target you based on your interests because you become a "black household" without an ID card.

I heard that this feature was popular among American users as soon as it was launched, but the activation rate in Asia was relatively low. According to a statistics by Adjust in mid-October, only 11% of users in China turned on this feature, and the activation rate in various regions did not show a clear upward trend.

However, no matter what the ratio is, mobile advertising will always be affected. According to a well-known domestic company, in the process of monitoring advertisements, the proportion of users with IDFA of 0 is only about 1%.

So maybe the advertising industry is overreacting a bit, after all, most people don't care or are not aware of it now. If everyone can make good use of user information and only use it for normal commercial promotion, this problem will not be too serious. But human nature is always greedy. As a group, humans enjoy the convenience of technology on the one hand, and use technology to create bigger problems on the other hand. When the problems are serious enough, they try to solve them with new technology. This is the "technological black hole"!