Apple iOS 17 and macOS Sonoma, Apple is bringing deeper and more thorough privacy protection to users.
In the new version of the system, Apple has introduced a link tracking protection feature that allows you to browse in privacy mode from other companies’ data tracking, supporting Mail, Messages and Safari. simply put, when it detects that the link URL you click on contains user data tracking parameters, it will automatically delete them.
For advertisers and data analytics companies, adding tracking parameters to certain websites is an effective way to track user activity across sites.
Such sites containing tracking codes add a special tracking identifier to the end of the link as opposed to the normal parameter. This method bypasses Safari’s Smart Tracking Prevention feature (this feature primarily blocks cross-site cookies and other session storage).
That is, when a site URL allows a destination’s analytics or ad service to read that URL, it can extract those same unique parameters and associate them with a back-end user profile in its database to flag specific users and serve personalized ads.
Apple is trying to combat this in its next-generation operating system this year, and Safari will automatically detect specific identifiers in URLs and remove those parts of the code, allowing users to visit the Web normally without the risk of being tracked by advertisers.
As a compensating measure, Apple is offering advertisers another way to measure ad activity, Private Click Measurement, which allows advertisers to still measure ad attribution in Safari’s privacy browsing mode, but without exposing user activity.
