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Comment by erdevs | Hacker News Reader

Is that definitively the case right now? (I'm asking because I genuinely don't know; not being rhetorical.) And will it definitely continue to be the case in the future when ios10 launches (and after)? (More rhetorical here, though curious if Apple has made some definitively clear and unqualified statement here that'd be hard to walk back in the future.)

I think the random id would be preferable from a user pov. But this may represent Apple's attempt to play nice with mobile ad companies and app pubs that rely on ads in at least making it easy for them to identify no-track users. (Then again, they could accomplish that in a more direct way by just having a flag here, which they may also do?)

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Yep, Apple giveth and Apple taketh away - broad categories of things that are considered user-hostile are banned, and if you try to do it Apple swings the banhammer liberally.

Also Apple's guidelines re: permissions is that the app must degrade in the absence of permissions gracefully, and any kind of "punishing the user" for denying perms is absolutely prohibited.

For all the bad things about the walled garden, this is one perk that is real.

As for Apple walking back on these things - anything is possible, but considering how hard they've been beating on the user privacy drum I doubt this will change in the foreseeable future

IMO the "zero" ID is preferable to a random ID. This way if anyone has legitimate reason to detect for this condition they can, but Apple has enough control over the platform to ban anyone doing so abusively. It's also more in line with Apple's permission systems (e.g., you can detect if you have Contacts permissions, rather than it returning, say, fake/empty contacts).

Couldn't they also just let you check a flag instead of checking for a magic number / proscribed id?

And to be more specific on my question, I get that they don't allow apps to punish users explicitly for OS-enabled choices. But what about rewarding users? Ie you can play/use the app however you want. But we'll give you 50 coins/10 loyalty points/whatever if you enable location tracking?

I mean to follow this all the way through... it should mean that apps can't choose to show, say, rewarded video ads (presently a $1B+ revenue/yr industry on iOS) only to users who have do not restrict ad tracking. Because then by definition only users who don't restrict ad tracking could get the reward from viewing the video. Will this be the case? It's an important question and a lot of startup value could be effected depending on the answer.

Yeah, most of the newer APIs let you check a flag, the older ones that didn't have permission built into them from the beginning (see: Address Book) need some behavior so old apps don't break though, so returning a "zero" ID seems reasonable.

AFAIK incentivizing permissions is allowed, so yeah, "50 coins for your location" is permissible. Though keep in mind that Apple will reject apps for requesting permissions without any functional need - so if your app isn't actually using the location data (and collecting it purely for ad targeting) it's likely your app will be rejected from the store.

You will have to invent some veneer of an excuse for collecting this user data, though how thin your excuse can be varies depending on Apple's mood.

Gotcha. So, if an app is monetizing (wholly or partially) through ads, they can still offer rewards for viewing those ads and turning on ad-tracking. Cool and thanks for dropping the knowledge. Think there's any chance that the policy regarding incentivizing turning on ad tracking will change alongside iOS 10?

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