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Comment by qzervaas | Hacker News Reader

Apple's already shown they don't like this behaviour with their randomised MAC addresses in iOS 8+. Obviously what this article references is done at the carrier level, not on open wifi networks.

I expect them to do something about this carrier-level behaviour next iOS. From a technical perspective, what could they do to prevent this?

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Run everything from the phone through a VPN over iCloud servers, so all traffic from every iPhone in the world hits the internet as if it comes out of Cupertino? Install Tor as an OS-level feature?

Tor as an OS-level feature may not spark the best reaction. It's been given a bad name ("deep web," silk road, etc) in mass media and many people don't understand it enough to think of it as anything other than bad.

I think that it'd be cool to have, but I don't think that Apple would ever implement it.

I never dreamed Apple would in any way officially support, or even acknowledge the existence of, ad blocking.

It's an aggressive strategy.

Apple is only blocking internet ads, not in-app ads, which makes it obvious that they're targeting content creators to push them to either Apple newsstand or iOS apps, where Apple gets a cut of the ads.

It's disappointing because Apple is using their mobile marketshare to attack and fragment the open web. Users either don't understand or don't care because they have cognitive bias towards ads to begin with - e.g. people only attribute negative ad experiences to ads, never good experiences (w/ few exceptions like the superbowl).

Apple is not blocking any ads. iAd makes little money and Apple is letting apps that block iAds into the app store. I know some people will oppose Apple no matter what they do but in this case they and the majority of users are right and you are wrong. People have a negative view of advertising for a very good reason.

Ads considerably degrade the browsing experience on mobile.

Most ads used to be in Flash which was blocked by default since not working on Ios, then everything turned into big and slow HTML5 stunts to replace Flash, which has the exact same effect as Flash : battery drain,... .

Apple, on the other hand controls the in-app anything experience.

Not saying to it's right , just saying that how Apple justifies its strategy.

Does anyone have a positive experience with ads on mobile?

To be clear, Apple is not blocking any ads. They are providing browser hooks to let people create ad blockers, just like (say) Google does on desktop Chrome. The difference is important.

Google makes money from ads, and now Microsoft is shifting towards that strategy with Win 10 being free etc. Apple on the other hand makes money from hardware, app store, 30% or whatever it is on ebooks and inapp purchases. I'm not really THAT surprised - only so much as I thought Apple would want a slice out of both pies, but it stands to reason that they can bleed much more from Google by blocking ads than they could gain from partnering with (or creating) ad networks.

>many people don't understand it enough to think of it as anything other than bad.

And what could transform public opinion of the software to the positive, over night, better than Apple adopting it?

Agree, it's phenomenally unlikely, but then again there is a part of me which could actually imagine Apple doing something like it. They wouldn't use Tor, of course, they'd build a proprietary equivalent, and then come out on a black stage to 'introduce Apple Undercover, a revolutionary enhancement to personal network privacy and security'.

It would also make their phones seem bizarrely slow which is not very Apple like.

Installing it (and utilising it) as a default, pro-user, privacy-preserving tool would do a lot to improve its public perception.

They could encourage developers to support and prefer HTTPS – which is exactly what they are doing: https://developer.apple.com/library/prerelease/ios/technotes...

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