ITP Continues to Restrict Tracking; Server-Side Approaches Critical for Data Integrity

The continued tightening of Apple's ITP forces streaming platforms and advertisers to re-evaluate their data collection and attribution strategies, with implications for marketing spend efficiency and audience segmentation. This push towards server-side solutions and first-party data is reshaping the ad tech landscape, rewarding those investing in more resilient infrastructure. Companies should actively monitor browser privacy updates—including potential expansions of Link Tracking Protection in Safari—to ensure their measurement capabilities remain intact and avoid significant data blackouts.

Apple continues to advance its privacy measures, building on Intelligent Tracking Protection (ITP). In September 2025, Safari 26 introduced Advanced Fingerprinting Protection (AFP), a new default feature aimed at blocking fingerprinting scripts by injecting "noise" into APIs, making device identification more difficult (per Billy Grace, September 2025). This complements existing protections like Advanced Tracking and Fingerprinting Protection (ATFP), which is enabled by default in Private Browsing and blocks network loads to known tracker domains. While Safari 26 did not, as initially rumored, enable Link Tracking Protection (LTP) by default for all browsing modes, it remains active in Private Browsing and some Apple apps, stripping click IDs like gclid and fbclid (Louder, September 2025). However, testing in Safari Technology Preview indicates Apple is experimenting with expanding LTP to regular browsing in future updates, posing a potential disruption for ad platforms. UTM parameters, however, remain largely unaffected across Safari versions. The move underscores Apple's strategic position as a privacy advocate, which funnels users into its own monetizable ecosystem while disrupting ad-based revenue streams for platforms like Google and Meta (Louder, September 2025). Industry experts (Datafly Signal, April 2026) emphasize that server-set cookies via HTTP headers, rather than JavaScript-set cookies, are exempt from ITP's 7-day cap and can persist for up to 400 days, providing a more robust solution for persistent identifiers. This ongoing evolution necessitates that marketers strengthen first-party data strategies, diversify measurement beyond click IDs, and deploy parallel tagging to future-proof their attribution models.