Study: since the rollout of iOS 13, which warns users of apps tracking their location, marketers have collected 68% less background and 24% less foreground data
Spare a thought, if you will, for the digital advertisers who have grown dependent on knowing your exact whereabouts at any instant.
Context & Ripple Effects
The study quantifies what Apple's location-tracking pop-up with a map of collected data was designed to do: when users see exactly where an app has followed them and why, they stop granting background access. Facebook saw this coming — before iOS 13 shipped it published a defensive blog post on how it uses location data (ahead of the rollout).
The scale matters because precise location was a commodity: apps were sharing coordinates with 75+ companies including advertisers, retailers, and hedge funds up to 14K times a day. The 68% collapse in background collection is the first hard measurement of that supply chain shrinking.
First-order effects
- Marketers lose the always-on location signal overnight: with 68% less background data collected, audience segments built on where users go — and the ad inventory priced off them — degrade immediately for buyers who never changed their own behavior.
- Facebook's pre-rollout blog post positioning its location use as user-benefiting becomes the template other data-dependent platforms must copy to defend their permission prompts.
Second-order effects
- Ad budgets migrate toward platforms with weaker consent friction: the same dynamic later shows up in Apple's IDFA changes, where iOS ad spending fell one-third in a month while Android spending rose 10% (per the WSJ report), leaving advertisers to rebalance spend by platform privacy regime.
- Location-data brokers and the app developers who sold them signals lose inventory, pushing intermediaries toward inferred or contextual targeting that doesn't require a permission prompt.
Third-order effects
- If each OS-level disclosure permanently removes a class of silent collection, mobile advertising restructures around whatever data survives the prompt — first-party relationships and contextual signals over third-party tracking, a shift the IDFA opt-in collapse later confirmed when Facebook's advertisers reported broken campaigns (as few users opted in).
- Apple establishes that interface design — a map, a reason string — is a regulatory-grade lever, letting one company reshape the data economy without legislation and inviting regulators to treat such prompts as the baseline.
The trend: Mobile platforms are converting privacy disclosures into de facto data regulation, with each OS permission change permanently shrinking the third-party location and tracking market that adtech was built on.