Oppenheimer believes Digital Turbine’s unique access on 1.6B smartphones’ firmware/software will become more valuable
Shares of several advertising technology, or “adtech,” companies are under pressure on Wednesday morning after The Wall Street Journal reported that Google (GOOGL) is planning to curtail cross-app tracking on Android phones, following a similar move by Apple (AAPL). Commenting on the news, Oppenheimer analyst Timothy Horan said that while the “initial reaction is gut-wrenching caution for all adtech names,” the reported changes “will only further bifurcate the sector into the haves and have-nots,” adding a stock that he sees being “firmly in the winning category.”
CROSS-APP TRACKING CHANGES: Google plans to adopt new privacy restrictions to curtail tracking across apps on Android smartphones, following Apple in putting restraints on an advertising industry that has covertly collected data across billions of mobile devices, The Wall Street Journal’s Tripp Mickle, Sam Schechner and Patience Haggin reported. Google’s plans for Android could hasten an end to more than a decade of advertising practices across smartphones in which companies including Meta Platforms’ (FB) Facebook layered their code into hundreds of thousands of apps to track consumer behavior, the authors noted.
Google said Wednesday that it plans to develop more privacy-focused replacements for the alphanumeric identifiers associated with individual smartphones that some apps use to gather and share information about users. The Alphabet unit said it plans to keep supporting current smartphone identifiers for at least the next two years and to give the industry substantial notice before any changes. It said it plans to work with the industry to develop the replacements, the authors wrote.
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