Apple and IDFA - Probabilistic Device Fingerprinting
All around the AdTech and Martech world, everyone is preparing for apple discontinuing IDFA. The ground is shaking, AdTech stocks are failing, experts are posting on LinkedIn. Yet, it’s not the first time Apple is pulling the rug from AdTech. When I first started in the field, the device UUID was the main identifier for a device. Then it was the MAC address of the device. Then Apple announced IDFA and IDFV, and blocked the collection of the MAC addresses. After the n+1 iteration of this, all companies got tired of this and started creating synthetic ids for the devices, which could be remapped to the new id space without backend changes. Yet, every time Apple pulled the rug, there was a massive scare and troves of engineers thrown at the transition. ...