Advertisers aren’t happy with anti-tracking solutions like Safari’s Intelligent Tracking Prevention. They came up with an alternative version to cookies: A digital token.
Digital Token
The argument that IAB Tech Lab, a partner to the Interactive Advertising Bureau, came up with is that we can’t trust companies like Apple, or government regulation to protect our privacy. Instead, we can only trust the advertising companies themselves.
We must work collaboratively across industries, governments, and NGOs to develop new technical standards that support continued innovation on a bedrock of consumer trust, privacy and security. We must set ourselves on an orderly path to rethink the cookie — an early, jerry-rigged internet technology that has far outlived its usefulness — and embrace a new paradigm of clear privacy settings and consumer controls tied to a standardized identifier.
This digital token would be a single identifier that all publishers and advertisers would use, instead of each one using their own. It would act as a repository for your advertising preferences, and they claim it would also let you opt-out of tracking. You know, like Safari and Firefox already do.
Further Reading:
[Apple Wants to Kill Tracking, Not Advertising]
[Apple Is Going to Sabotage the Internet, Says Advertisers]
Andrew:
This makes perfect sense. After all, whoever got hurt trusting a sales person? I mean, next to God and mom, who does one think of next in terms of trust? Sales people, of course!
And yes, they’re right; that old jerry-rigged system of cookies needs to be supplanted by an entirely new jerry-rigged system of localising a consumer’s preferences in a single conveniently accessible repository for all advertisers. A good time will surely be had by all.
And as for opting out of being tracked, why, I’ll bet it’ll be just as easy being granted a Catholic divorce stamped with a Papal seal.
It’s so comforting to know that we have sales people working so tirelessly to free us poor sods from the tyranny of enforced privacy.