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Anonymous
June 14, 2018
Question

Tracking Apple Users With Apple's Intelligent Tracking Prevention Features

  • June 14, 2018
  • 1 reply
  • 1371 views

Hey everyone, first-time poster! I'm wondering if anyone has any idea how effectively Marketing works in light of Apple's increasingly stringent privacy protection measures on Safari on iOS and macOS. I've been unable to get a helpful response from Marketo about Apple's planned macOS & iOS Safari Intelligent Tracking Prevention features.

It seems like those features mean that we will have no data and be unable to use cookies with customers that are coming to us from Apple mobile devices or macOS Safari.

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1 reply

SanfordWhiteman
SanfordWhiteman
Level 10
June 15, 2018

Welcome Matthew!

ITP (v1) is already in the wild, and the next version can be previewed with Safari Tech Preview.

Luckily, as of now, you don't have a terrific amount to worry about with regard to Marketo's Munchkin analytics library. ITP is designed to thwart cross-site remarketing, not to prevent same-domain journey tracking. While some of its measures can impact 1st-party cookies like the Munchkin _mkto_trk, with proper preparation you should be OK.

Because of ITP, we no longer recommend embedding Marketo assets in third-party sites -- the prime example of such assets being Marketo forms -- using the same domain you use for Marketo Landing Pages. In other words, instead of referencing //pages.example.com in the form embed code, allocate a new Domain Alias in Marketo (and corresponding DNS registration + CNAME RR, of course) like assets.example2.info and load embedded assets from there instead. The intent of this setup is to prevent the same cookie from being seen in both 1st- and 3rd-party contexts.

But despite the optimistic take above, more research is necessary. And Apple doesn't make this research easy. Amorphous references to "machine learning" -- some say the learning corpus is built on the local machine only, but I don't buy that -- mean someone has to dig into the WebKit source code. Yet, AFAIK, no independent person has done a technical deep dive, despite WK being open source (though I'm not sure there aren't closed-source components at work here as well).

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