Apple's Privacy Update: What to Know

Apple’s new iOS 14.5 contains a privacy feature that’s worrying the digital advertising industry. iPhone and iPad users will now be asked if they’d like to allow individual apps to track their activity across other apps. Digital advertisers, like Facebook, fear the answer will overwhelmingly be “no,” which is why some say Apple’s App Tracking Transparency (ATT) feature could seriously change how much advertisers get to know about us.  On today’s Brainstorm, Michal Lev-Ram and Brian O’Keefe examine what the ATT means for rivaling tech giants Apple and Facebook, as well as for smaller businesses and consumers. Fortune’s Aaron Pressman explains how Facebook went from running full-page ads blasting Apple’s decision to claiming it could, in fact, be good for business.   Todd Parsons, Chief Product Officer at online advertising platform Criteo, says there are effective ways of advertising to consumers without accessing the kind of data that targeted advertising requires.   Also in this episode, Gennie Gebhart, a privacy researcher with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, explains how advertising is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to how user data is commoditized; what we don’t know about, she says, is the vast network of data brokers we’ve never heard of, who are watching us.    Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices