Apple recently announced new privacy features that will be included with its iOS 14 software. Among these privacy updates: A change in how Apple handles location tracking that will have significant impacts on targeted advertisements.

Current software already lets you hide your location from specific apps through your settings, but when the new version launches this fall, users will be asked if they would like apps to allow or not allow tracking location, but also across websites – giving iPhone owners the ability to “opt out” of web tracking that is key for personalized advertisements. Specifically, the software update requires developers to have user consent before tracking their ad identifiers. This poses a challenge for targeted ads as it is highly likely that users will opt out of tracking when given the option.

While Apple has since introduced a new privacy-focused framework tool for developers that can retrieve and aggregate data anonymously to track if an ad is successful, other metrics for tracking ad performance and demographic information would be nearly impossible.

How does Apple’s new privacy feature impact your digital advertising strategy? The iOS 14 privacy update likely means major adjustments for your Facebook and Instagram ad strategies. Because Facebook doesn’t have an operating system or app store like Google or Apple, it relies on the data collected from the group of apps it owns when determining user trends and to target ads appropriately. One of Facebook’s first steps into providing more transparency into its tracking process is its Limited Data Use feature. We’re leveraging this feature to keep our clients at the forefront of new privacy updates.

The feature offers businesses an option to limit how Facebook uses the data they send. Implementing a feature like this will have slight impacts on the current performance of our ads, however, it ensures we’re always staying ahead of the curve in being fully compliant with privacy rules.

In addition to this, we’re constantly communicating with Facebook to restructure the events that we track to guarantee that any potential negative impacts of privacy changes are kept to a minimum.

Our team is staying on top of the current internet privacy landscape. We’re working to make sure your digital advertising strategy remains optimal as Apple, Facebook and Google continue their ongoing pursuit of providing complete transparency