IAB Tech Lab: no rival Safari fix meets all three ad requirements

Shailley Singh, chief operating officer and executive vice president of product at IAB Tech Lab, said the group's Trusted Server software is the only workable industrywide response to the tracking restrictions Apple built into Safari. He made the argument in an essay titled Apple's Private browsing and the only practical path for advertising, published on 29 October 2026 and updated on 31 October.

Singh set three requirements for any response: growing and reaching audiences at scale, preserving necessary advertising services, and protecting publishers' and advertisers' choice of partners. He argued that three alternatives fail to meet all three together: an industry-built browser, a publisher model driven by AI agents, and replacing publishers' ad servers.

Singh defended Trusted Server as a publisher-controlled execution layer at the edge or behind a content delivery network that supports server-side auctions, creative processing and first-party delivery paths. But he conceded the software is working towards production evidence across integrations, formats, measurement and publisher economics, and that its documentation identifies limits in browser components and creative processing.

The essay comes as restrictions that began with the iOS 27 rollout on 14 September have seen Safari refuse to contact a set of identity and ad tech domains, stopping The Trade Desk's ads from rendering. The essay is an opinion piece by an executive at the organisation that builds the product it recommends, and it cites no revenue, latency or adoption figures and names no publisher using Trusted Server.

What do these terms mean?

Trusted Server: Open-source software that moves part of ad technology onto a server controlled by the publisher instead of the reader's browser.

Identity resolution: Linking a person's data across devices and sites to create a single identifier.

Publisher ad server: The system that manages ad space on a publisher's site and chooses which ad appears.

Measurement and verification: Tools that independently prove an ad was delivered and seen by the intended audience.