Apple just flipped the bird to third-party advertisers. Reports are surfacing that Apple’s review team has started rejecting applications that have cookie tracking technologies included in the application (also called “Safari flip-flop” or “HTML5 first party cookies”). Marketing firm, Fiksu, has noticed rejections increasing, and that ” it could be a case where Apple is signaling to the industry which direction it needs to be headed. And specifically, Apple likely wants developers to start transitioning to its own Ad Identifier technology.”
Apple has given users the ability to limit ad tracking from mobile developers in iOS (general > about > advertising > limit ad tracking), making it more difficult for advertisers to figure out what you’re up to on your device and what you’re clicking on these days.
To be honest, outside of people like us who make a living from advertising (who pays for news these days?), not too many people would care if ad tracking was disabled permanently forever. There are, however, other alternatives to cookie tracking that are available to marketers looking to keep dibs on users tendencies and practices.
From the sounds of it, we’re heading towards a cookie-free world in some ways. It should be interesting to see how this affects the freemium and ad-driven model used by a lot of applications these days.