Snap confirms it was testing probabilistic matching to track iOS users for a few months, but will discontinue the program after Apple rolls out tracking changes
Owner of Snapchat has explored how to track users with data from third party companies — Snap has explored how it can circumvent …
Context & Ripple Effects
Snap's admission lands mid-spiral: weeks earlier, Apple had sent cease-and-desist emails to Chinese apps testing CAID, a tracker built to survive its upcoming IDFA changes — so Snap was running a parallel experiment in the same gray zone. The confirmation matters because it names a major Western platform, not just offshore developers, as willing to probe around Apple's rules.
The arc continues after this story: by December, reporting showed Meta, Snap, and other iOS developers still collecting anonymized and aggregated user data despite ATT being live — suggesting Snap didn't abandon measurement, only the identifiable kind. It echoes an older Snap pattern from when the company cut off third-party apps to contain privacy fallout.
First-order effects
- Snap loses a months-long test pipeline for matching iOS users without identifiers, pulling that targeting capability from its ads product right as ATT degrades identifier-based measurement anyway.
Second-order effects
- Apple's willingness to police workarounds — demonstrated against the CAID apps — raises the enforcement cost every platform must price before deploying similar probabilistic schemes; Meta and peers pivot to aggregated, anonymized collection instead, which sits outside ATT's individual-consent trigger.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, individual-level ad tracking on iOS fragments into a cat-and-mouse cycle — each workaround (CAID, probabilistic matching) met with Apple enforcement or developer pushback — while measurement consolidates around cohort- and aggregate-level methods that regulators and platforms can tolerate.
The trend: Mobile advertising is splitting into two tracks under Apple's privacy regime: sanctioned aggregate measurement inside the walled garden, and a shrinking, enforcement-prone gray market of identity workarounds.