What Is The Deeper Story of IDFA and Ad Tracking?

And what does that mean for the future?

Photo by Eugene on Unsplash

I’m not sure that I truly understand the whole IDFA business with Apple and the changes made as of the IOS 14.5 release, but I’ll tell you what I think I know. I’m sure folks will be anxious to correct me if I’m wrong.

What is IDFA?

IDFA stands for Identifier for Advertisers. We’ve had XST (cross-site tracking) with cookies for some time before IDFA. Either is what gives an advertiser on my website the knowledge that you were looking at hottubs at another site yesterday.

Safari on IOS and macOS have had settings to block XST since 2016’s IOS 10 which added a Limit Ad Tracking (LAT) setting. That could have upset Facebook back then, but LAT was not on by default, so only about 20% of users turned tracking off, either because they didn’t care or because they were not aware of the setting.

Why IDFA?

Apple added IDFA to IOS way back in 2012 with iOS 6. IDFA is a unique identifier. The purpose was to replace the browser cookies used for XST and to provide a XST mechanism for apps. Apps don’t have cookies; adding IDFA means that a user of an app could be identified in IOS browsers and vice versa.