ITP 2.2: Here’s what publishers and advertisers need to know about privacy regulation changes

If economists add decimal points to show they have a sense of humour, tech platforms add decimal points to prompt palpitations from concerned tech vendors.

And where Apple is concerned, Intelligent Tracking Prevention (ITP) 2.2, has done exactly that.

Hot takes about implications for adtech, affiliate marketing, advertisers and publishers abound.

The primary source of panic?

That ITP 2.2 – which kills cookies after a 24-hour window – makes it impossible to track the transactions between publishers and merchants that power commerce content as a meaningful source of revenue.

So we’re here to set the record straight.

There’s no need to panic

The major affiliate networks have long anticipated a future without cookies and have taken countermeasures to compensate.

Their response to ITP 2.2 has been a common framework implemented across the vast majority of advertisers, focused on a tag deployed site-wide on websites. Over 80% of large advertisers have adopted it.

A detailed explanation from our Head of London Engineering on how it works is available on PerformanceIn.

In short they’ve taken a legitimate response and mitigated for ITP 2.2’s impact in the vast majority of cases.

What about privacy changes in Google Chrome?

This is trickier as Google have been sparse with the details.

In general, the move appears aimed to give users more control over how their data is “collected” and crack down on organisations using so-called “fingerprinting” to track people in underhanded ways.

The site-wide tag solutions networks have introduced do not collect personal information. Instead they simply work to match transactions to publishers. In that sense advertisers and publishers should not be concerned about the changes in regard to the revenue they generate from commerce content.

While networks like AWIN acknowledge that they do make use of “fingerprinting”, the only use it as a last resort and in a tiny percentage of cases.

In a similar way to ITP, ITP 2.0 and ITP 2.2 therefore publishers and advertisers should expect minimal impact from Chrome privacy changes.

These rules are designed to be good to users, and if businesses respect their users, the rules should be good for them too.

Photo Credit: Cnet