Interesting entry in the official WebKit blog about Safari’s data protection measures.
Web AdAttributionKit (formerly Private Click Measurement) is a way for advertisers, websites, and apps to implement ad attribution and click measurement in a privacy-preserving way.
So is this the same thing more or less as Firefox’s “privacy-preserving attribution” and Chromium’s “privacy sandbox / Topics API”? Your browser collaborates with advertisers to track you, just in a “”“privacy-preserving”“” way.
Which browsers are still free of this?
- other iOS browsers that are not Safari (I’m not sure though!) (also I don’t know what’s the situation with Firefox and Chrome - did they port their separate tracking mechanisms as mentioned above to iOS?)
- Brave and Vivaldi (who say they disable Topics API)
- privacy-focused niche browsers like Librewolf or Mull
- independent browsers like Pale Moon and (one day!) Ladybird
Note webkit is gnerally far behind chromiun in terms of security updates.
Source?
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Which browsers are still free of this?
- Brave
Brave has been advertising their own “private attribution” for years, in their marketing materials geared towards advertisers:
Reporting with Integrity:
Brave’s anonymous-but-accountable attribution model confirms event activity, without exposing or identifying the user. [1] [2]
Many people forget, or were never aware, that from the start, a core pillar of Brave’s business model has centered on ad-tech and ad-delivery. From the very early days their business model and their big bet has centered on reimagining advertising, not eliminating it. In the early days this was well known (by both Brave enthusiasts and critics, and its VC investors), but as Brave’s userbase has grown and changed, it seems this is not common knowledge anymore.
If you weren’t paying attention to Brave in its early days, it can be instructive to go back and read articles and discussions from ~7-10 years ago. The core business model was discussed more openly and explicitly than it typically is today.
Here is a relevant excerpt on attribution from a 2016 interview with Brave’s CEO:
Brave cuts out the middle-players who subsist on tracking, replacing them with in-browser ad preference inference where the data stays on your device; and anonymous protocols for ad impression and conversion confirmation [aka Attribution]
With regard to Apple
I didn’t pay much attention to them until the last year or two, so I’m not exactly sure when Apple rolled out their approach to ‘private attribution’ in Safari but I don’t think its super new, “Privacy-Preserving Ad Attribution” including “Private Click Measurement” was a featured topic at Apple’s 2021 Developer Conference.
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