AdGuard published a piece on Monday examining Apple’s new technology coming to iOS 14.5 called Private Click Measurement. The company points out that it’s less transparent than regular web cookies.
Apple & PCM
Private Click Measurement is an upcoming feature that offers advertisers some middle ground. It lets advertisers track the effectiveness of their ads without needing to track people across the web.
PCM achieves this tradeoff by sending attribution reports with limited data in a dedicated Private Browsing mode without any cookies, delaying reports randomly between 24 and 48 hours to disassociate events in time, and handling data on-device.
AdGuard says this is less transparent than regular ole’ cookies because users had the ability to see and manually remove cookies at will. The blog post highlights its own AdGuard Tracking Protection filter that can block PCM tracking and cookie-based tracking. But PCM is a toggle you’ll find in Settings > Safari on iOS | iPadOS that can be toggled on and off at will.
Still, it will be interesting to see the reactions from advertisers in the coming months to PCM as the carrot to Apple’s App Tracking Transparency stick.