Compliant or not?
This tracking paradigm might be noncompliant with ATT, said Laura Edelson, who has served as a postdoctoral researcher at New York University and chief technologist of the antitrust division of the Department of Justice. However, only Apple would be qualified to make that determination. Apple did not respond to comment by press time.
Google, for its part, said in a 2021 blog post that it will not use signals banned by ATT for advertising purposes, and as a result, not track people, thereby would not need to show user ATT prompts asking for consent.
Google also adopted WBraid in March 2021 in response to ATT, tech that it describes as a privacy-compliant identifier that relies on conversion modeling to obscure individual users’ identities.
“WBraid is designed to be used in compliance with another platform’s privacy requirements and is used for measurement purposes,” a Google spokesperson said. “It cannot be used to identify users.”
On ATT’s frequently asked questions page, Apple writes that an ATT prompt must be served to users if tracking occurs within an in-app browser. Adalytics observed clicking on ad links would bring users to YouTube’s in-app browser. Apple also says a company needs user permission to use any third-party services that pass unique identifiers for ad targeting and measurement, and that apps may not derive data from a device for the purpose of identifying it, also known as conducting fingerprinting.
According to these policies, WBraid appears to be the kind of identifier Apple needs to ask users’ consent to enable, Edelson said.
“[WBraid] is being shared—or at least observed being shared—between different ad intermediaries,” said Edelson. “At least theoretically, that is what that policy is designed to give users control over.”
The ambiguity of Google’s relationship with ATT
YouTube is a rare example of an app funded by advertising that does not serve users’ consent prompts post-ATT, said Eric Seufert, founder of mobile advertising newsletter Mobile Dev Memo. Still, the uniqueness of the world’s largest advertising company following a different playbook than other apps does not inherently mean a breach of policy.
“The only right answer is I don’t know if it’s compliant or not,” Seufert said. “Google very famously declared they wouldn’t show an ATT prompt, and that’s a decision that they made without sharing any context.”
