Apple Releases Private Click Measurement to iOS 14.5

Apple is introducing a new technology called Private Click Measurement to iOS 14.5. It’s an attempt to give online advertisers a way to measure ads privately.
Private Click Measurement
The system tries to find a balance between tracking users via user/device IDs with some data reports.
At the same time, we want to support measurement of online advertising. PCM achieves this tradeoff by sending attribution reports with limited data in a dedicated Private Browsing mode without any cookies, delaying reports randomly between 24 and 48 hours to disassociate events in time, and handling data on-device.

An 8-bit identifier on the click source side, which means 256 parallel ad campaigns can be measured per website or app.
A 4-bit identifier on the conversion side, which means 16 different conversion events can be distinguished.
Fraud prevention via unlinkable tokens will be coming.

The WebKit post says Apple first introduced this technology in 2019 under a different name. To become a web standard, another browser needs to add PCM into its system. This is a current goal of Apple.
Tags: Advertising, privacy, Safari