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Despite one or two recent privacy knock-backs, Apple has been lauded for its attempts to improve security and enhance privacy with its latest OS releases. Limiting and exposing user location tracking and blocks on background processing by the likes of Google and Facebook come to mind. But one privacy-focused feature seems to have serious unintended consequences—and not everyone is happy about that.
As reported on October 15 by Digiday, a trade outlet for the online media world, Safari’s enhanced private browsing mode prevents media outlets counting the numbers of stories a user has read, preventing that outlet from knowing when to kick in with a paywall restriction. This isn’t new. Other browsers have the same feature and impact—Google Chrome’s incognito mode, for example. But media outlets responded by introducing blanket restrictions when such private browsing was enabled.
But here’s what’s new. With Safari’s latest security enhancements, it “evades the countermeasures” news publishers have deployed to stop visitors using such private browsing modes. “An internet user who tries to read a story on the Boston Globe’s website using Chrome’s incognito mode will be blocked by a window demanding that visitors register or turn the mode off. But a visitor using the most recent version of Safari in private browsing mode doesn’t get that same message and can read a limitless amount of content on the Globe’s site.”
Enabling the privater browsing mode—and its equivalents—stops websites reading or writing cookies on devices; essentially those breadcrumbs that easily track us site to site, platform to platform, are blocked. It was intended to frustrate user tracking, but you can easily see how many websites have now baked such technology into their core commercial models—all of which will now need something of a rethink.
In the U.S., Chrome is much more popular than Safari on computers, although that’s different for mobiles where Safari takes the lead. But regardless of the platform, Safari users tend to be on Apple devices and, despite the debate back and forth, that does tend to indicate that on average those users are “more affluent and tend to pay for news.” And because Apple users “over-index as news subscribers,” this becomes a disproportionate issue for the sites concerned.
Well, it probably wasn’t much of an issue before this news broke. Because most of those over-indexing Apple Safari users were unaware of this. But they’re clued in now.
“Because this issue has just hit, few publishers know whether it is negatively impacting their businesses,” says Digiday, although “an executive at one news publisher that operates a metered paywall noted that subscription sales driven by users in private mode was ‘slightly softer’ this weekend.”
The risk for users is that this pushes outlets into mandatory registration or even hard paywalls for all—the only way to counter the problem. Especially given that what Safari has done will likely be pushed to other browsers as well. There are alternative solutions, such as mandatory registration with the same limits on free articles, but this also acts as an impediment to the casual browsing that leads to subscriptions. Users read some articles and eventually subscribe.
The balance of privacy and monetisation has been a major theme this year, driven by the social media scandals of the last two years and exacerbated by data breaches, privacy mishaps and a seemingly glib approach to user data security. And while the primary focus of protections by Apple (and others) is to reverse this pervasive tracking and monitoring, here is an interesting example of an inadvertent hit being taken elsewhere and a business model that needs to change.
One thing is for sure, though, the shift to privacy shouldn’t be reversed under any circumstances. Impacted businesses just need to find alternatives.
