Apple’s ITP (Intelligent Tracking Protection), introduced back in 2017, and updated this year, is having consequences on several digital industries, affecting mainly publishers, ecommerce, and advertisers.

Apple’s WebKit team published its tracking prevention policy last month, and the team lists the “unintended impacts” of the Intelligent Tracking Protection (ITP):

  • Funding websites using targeted or personalized advertising (see Private Click Measurement below).
  • Measuring the effectiveness of advertising.
  • Federated login using a third-party login provider.
  • Single sign-on to multiple websites controlled by the same organization.
  • Embedded media that uses the user’s identity to respect their preferences.
  • “Like” buttons, federated comments, or other social widgets.
  • Fraud prevention.
  • Bot detection.
  • Improving the security of client authentication.
  • Analytics in the scope of a single website.
  • Audience measurement.

Apple’s WebKit team says it is not granting exceptions to specific parties, as “WebKit often has no technical means to distinguish valid uses from tracking, and doesn’t know what the parties involved will do with the collected data, either now or in the future.”

The “unintended impact” of Apple’s ITP