What Happened
In order to bypass an issue posed by a new privacy feature called App Transport Security (ATS) in iOS 9, Google has published a blog post suggesting iOS developers using its Google Mobile Ads SDK to add an exception in their coding to “allow HTTP requests to succeed and non-secure content to load successfully.” Essentially, Google is encouraging app owners to choose ad delivery over encryption.
What Brands Should Do
In light of this new information, brands that serve ads in their apps need to be mindful of the user data that may be sent unencrypted to ad exchanges, which neither Google nor Apple has control over. While the foregone revenue may hurt in the short run, reputational risk may be more important in the current environment.
Source: Google Ads Developer Blog