Apple wins a secret war in China

A concerted effort by Chinese companies to protect Apple’s privacy policy has been halted, a major victory for the iPhone manufacturer over what appears to be a threat to its privacy worldwide.

Technical teams under the leadership of Baidu, Tencent and TikTok ByteDance have worked with two Beijing-affiliated groups to develop a new way to track iPhones, called CAID, which will allow users to identify users even if they refuse apps to use Apple ID, called IDFA. .

CAID was developed last year and was tested publicly for several months before its release in late March. Prior to The Financial Times reports in its presence, advertising experts said the project posed a serious threat to Apple’s international privacy policy and its $ 50bn business in China.

Eric Seufert, a consultant, said the combined effort put Apple in an “impossible thing”. He also said Apple should choose between rejecting CAID, putting anger in Beijing, or taking the shameful idea of ​​allowing it and acknowledging that the world’s most populous country is playing by different rules.

“Apple has a disaster in its hands,” he wrote on Twitter.

apple it made his position clear shortly after banning changes to several Chinese apps that listed CAID in their apps from the App Store.

Several people in China and Hong Kong say that, following Apple’s retaliation, CAID lost support and the operation failed.

“This is a success for Apple, as well as a consumer secret, as Chinese tech giants are forced to back off and follow Apple’s rules,” said Rich Bishop, head of AppInChina, China’s largest global software developer.

“China’s ecosystems were combining cattle with CAID, assuming Apple could not ban any major program on the market,” adds Alex Bauer, chief marketing officer for adtech Branch.

“Apple called for a compromise, and it appears to have re-established the problem by harshly jumping on the people who have already received it, before the deal is strong.”

ByteDance did not respond to a request for comment. Tencent and Baidu declined to comment. Apple did not mention CAID in particular, but added that “its App Store terms and instructions also apply to all manufacturers around the world” and that “apps found to be disregarding user choice will be rejected”.

Although CAID was led by the government, 2,000 members of the China Advertising Association and the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology, a research organization under the Ministry of Industry and Technology technology, it is unknown whether these groups were supported by Beijing.

Nor was it obvious that the parties were aware that CAID had violated Apple’s laws, whose territories are white. is being carefully examined in the US and abroad.

Spokesmen for some of the companies doing so say they believe CAID received Apple, and CAA, whose website still has information about CAID, including the application form, told FT they were “connected” with the technical expert.

If CAID grew and received all the support of Beijing, that is what happened it could have spread. A CAA expert said the team was also using an Android identifier, called OID, but the CAA wanted to test the water on the small iPhone market.

Bishop said if Chinese companies comply with Apple’s rules, they could promote Advertising, the Apple Store’s advertising business, in which manufacturers can pay for their software to be the starting point. The project is about five years old in the US but was only discovered in China last month. “It’s one of the last steps to guide Chinese users,” he said.