iOS 15: What Marketers Need To Know About Tracking and Privacy

Apple recently released iOS 15, which had multiple updates to its privacy and tracking policies in an attempt to protect users’ information. “Privacy has been central to our work at Apple from the very beginning,” said Craig Federighi, Apple’s senior vice president of Software Engineering. 

These updates will have a lasting impact on marketing strategies and digital marketers have to adapt to the new policies. Examples of these new policies include Mail Privacy Protection, Hide My Email, and iCloud Private Relay. Let’s take a look at the details behind these additions.

Mail Privacy Protection

According to Apple, “Mail Privacy Protection hides your IP address, so senders can’t link it to your other online activity or determine your location. And it prevents senders from seeing if and when you’ve opened their email.” What does this mean for marketers? Reporting on email campaigns will be less accurate as marketers won’t be able to see recipients’ IP addresses or if they opened their emails. However, this feature is not the default setting and will have to be chosen by the user. Those who have opted-in will appear to have opened every third-party email they receive, potentially affecting open rates.

Digital marketers who are affected by Mail Privacy Protection can use alternative metrics to measure your email campaign such as conversion rate and click rate. Using other metrics will steer you away from open rates, which will likely be affected by Mail Privacy Protection.

Hide My Email

An additional feature that enhances email privacy is Hide My Email. When Hide My Email is enabled, users who create an account with third-party apps will not be obligated to share their personal email with the app. Instead, Apple generates unique, random email addresses that forward to your personal inbox. This forms a problem for marketers. Randomized email addresses make it increasingly difficult for marketers to properly define and target audiences. A good alternative may be looking to alter customer identification methods such as using phone numbers or names rather than emails. 

iCloud Private Relay

Another hit to marketers comes in the form of iCloud Private Relay. Those who enable Private Relay will have their IP addresses hidden from third-party servers meaning they cannot be tracked across the web. Naturally, that makes some marketers concerned. Without users' IP addresses, it will become difficult for marketers to target their audience. Campaigns that rely on geo-targeting will especially have a hard time adapting to Private Relay. 

There are a couple of loopholes marketers can utilize to target users. According to a report from DigiDay, “Private Relay restricts traffic apps sent over an insecure web connection (HTTP). So apps that use an IP address for fingerprinting could theoretically work around this by using a secure web connection or some other transport protocol.” Additionally, users can only enable iCloud Private Relay if they are subscribed to iCloud +, a premium storage service for paying customers. While many iCloud users may subscribe to the service, it won’t be all of them. While it is too soon to know the true impact of Private Relay, it is certainly something marketers should keep tabs on. It may even lead to the end of fingerprinting as we know it. 

Takeaway

User privacy is becoming more prevalent and users are becoming progressively worried about where their information is going and who is receiving it. According to a 2019 study from Pew Research Center, 79% of American adults say they are very or somewhat concerned about how companies are using the data they collect about them. This contrasts with data-driven marketers who look to gain as much consumer insight as possible. Now, marketers will have to adapt to new strategies that coincide with the privacy values of their audience.