Apple is looking to take advantage of all the controversy surrounding privacy with online platforms. With Facebook and other companies being in the news for either actively sharing personal information, or failing to properly secure personal data, lots of consumers are looking for better ways to protect themselves.
At Apple’s latest World Wide Developers Conference (WWDC) they have announced that they will be taking additional steps to protect personal data. They have already pushed out Intelligent Tracking Prevention (ITP) in Safari 11, which has helped to disable pervasive ad retargeting for users of their browser.
With the next version of iOS, which will include Safari 12, users will also have notifications that will let them choose whether or not to share data with third-party widgets. Widgets include Facebook’s Like button as well as comments widgets from services like Disqus. On top of that, Apple is making fingerprinting (tracking the identify of users to specific devices) a lot more difficult.
The overall move toward more privacy comes at an ideal time. While this may limit Apple’s ability to serve up highly targeted ads, which they have been trying to do more of over the past couple years, it will likely get them a lot of positive publicity as more and more people are taking privacy seriously. This move will also hinder the ability of Facebook and other tech companies from gathering and sharing the data, so it will help to level out that playing field, which will be a positive for Apple.
