Limited Ad Tracking

Ever feel a bit creeped out when you search up a product on Amazon and later see the exact same products showing up in your Facebook timeline? It’s not a coincidence; thanks to Google and other big players in the tech industry, advertisers figured out years ago how they could track you across the internet, being able to determine what you search for and purchase in order to build a virtual profile on your surfing and shopping habits.

Apple has been fighting against this for a while, and with iOS 14, the iPhone maker will be ushering in a whole new era of mobile ads by actually asking you if you want to be tracked, on an app-by-app basis. There were ways to limit or turn off this tracking in prior iOS versions, but with iOS 14, Apple is being downright proactive about it — if an app wants to track you with an advertising identifier, it’s going to have to be completely up-front about telling you what it’s doing, and ask for your explicit permission to cooperate.

To be fair, there may be reasons to opt-in to this kind of advertising, since denying an app permission doesn’t mean you won’t see ads at all — it just means you’ll see random ads instead of ones that are more specifically tailored to your interests.