How iOS 17 will make it harder for advertisers to send iPhone users personalized ads
Many of you are already looking forward to September when iOS 17 should be released for the iPhone XS and later. At WWDC earlier this month, Apple revealed some of the new features coming to iOS 17 such as Live Voicemail, which gives you a real-time transcription when someone is leaving you a voicemail. This way you can decide whether to connect to the call and speak to the caller instead of letting him/her continue to leave a voice message.
There is also the new StandBy feature which turns your charging iPhone into a smart display when in portrait mode. Or the new feature for the Messages app that will alert you when friends and family members safely arrive at their destinations. Some things will be going on in the background in iOS 17 to make iPhone users more secure. For example, 9to5Mac reveals that a new feature called Link Tracking Protection will activate automatically in Mail, Messages, and Safari while in Private browsing mode.
What this feature does to protect iPhone users is find user-identifiable tracking parameters in link URLs and delete them. A tracking identifier is added to the end of the URL belonging to a web page and is used by advertisers to track a user across various websites. To make this work, the feature will read the URL and delete only the part it deems to be used as an identifier for tracking. The remainder of the URL will not be changed to make sure that you get to the website you were looking to visit.
On top, a URL with the tracking identifier shown inside the box. Underneath, what the same URL will look like with the new feature
In Private browsing on Safari, the Link Tracking Protection feature will work when you're making your way through the internet from website to website. On Mail and Messages, Link Tracking Protection will remove a tracking identifier when you click on a link.
A tracking identifier is made up of a unique series of letters and numbers which means each identifier is connected to one device. With this tracking tag, advertisers can send personalized ads to a particular device which means that when you have the Link Tracking Protection feature enabled, the ads you receive might no longer seem relevant to you.
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