Every Major Advertising Group Is Blasting Apple for Blocking Cookies in Safari

> When Apple first announced the limitations to cross-website tracking in June, the company said the changes are meant to improve trust with users, explaining that “users feel that trust is broken when they are being tracked and privacy-sensitive data about their web activity is acquired for purposes that they never agreed to.”

This!

I switched from Windows+Android to the Apple ecosystem in 2015. Because I love so many things about Apple products. But this alone (Apple taking measures to protect its customers' privacy concerns) is a huge huuuge selling point and a competitive advantage for them.

Were there a publicly-traded company that manufactures small violins (preferably the one that makes "world's smallest"), I'd go long on their stock right now.

I mean, who do they expect to persuade with this? Is there anyone not tied to the adtech industry shouting, "Damn you, Apple, and your assault on open web standards!" 'cuz me, I'm thinking, "without even reading the article, if the ad industry is upset about it, it must be good."

What's especially infuriating about the advertisers' spin here is that Apple appears to have gone to a lot of effort to not destroy their business model. They're not simply blocking third-party tracking cookies, they're expiring or partitioning them more rapidly based on how infrequently the user interacts with a given website.

https://webkit.org/blog/7675/intelligent-tracking-prevention...

> In an open letter expected to be published this afternoon, the groups describe the new standards as “opaque and arbitrary,”

Funny, "opaque and arbitrary" is exactly how I'd describe the web of 3rd party tracking of consumers these companies engage in. When all of these groups agree to openly disclose everything they do to track users, see the databases they maintain on us and allow easy opt outs like agreeing to follow the wishes of users who enable Do Not Track ... then I'll consider reenabling 3rd party cookies, etc.

Sometimes you can judge the merit and effectiveness of an action based on who is complaining about it. It seems that what Apple is doing is effective in limiting tracking. Kudos to Apple!

I really hope advertisers are unrelenting in their attack on Apple over this, at least until Streisand hears about it. How dare Apple give users the tools to staunch the flow of their data?

We all know that newspapers could never have existed without all that tracking of which ads readers saw. And broadcast TV was a universal failure in reaching consumers with advertising. The idea of advertising without tracking is just unprecedented.

The advertisers arrogance and tone deafness here is just unfathomable.

From the outside, it appears tracking benefits aggregators more than these ad agencies. Without tracking, it makes a good agency even more important as they keep track of which sites generally have which audiences and target ads based on those trends instead of relying solely on doubleclick's data. Google and FB have a lot to lose here, not advertisers nor ad agencies, imo.

I think the end of pervasive tracking would not kill internet advertising, it would just make value-add middlemen more valuable. I know I'm ignoring re-targeting, but gawd the reason I didn't buy your widget while I was on your site is not because I forgot to put in my CC info. Re-targeting is not something humanity should be proud of (even though it's hard to run certain internet businesses and be competitive without it as long your competition is using it).

It almost feels like a luxury that when you examine an item at Best Buy and decide against purchasing that a store clerk doesn't jump in front of your car asking you to reconsider as you're trying to pull out of the parking lot. Or follow you home...

> They argue it'll hurt user experience and campaign targeting

Uh, it's the ads that are hurting the user experience. And I don't particularly care if your targeting suffers.

Of course it will hurt campaign performance and targeting, which is exactly why they need to block those cookies.

I have never seen such a group so spoiled as marketing peeps. These guys and gals demand blood from stones to justify their "spend", and have been single-handedly responsible for so much of the web's dark patterns and annoyances.

Anything to cast these louts back to the stone age is a good innovation. Once advertising goes back to products selling you on themselves, and not this emotional "lifestyle" BS, we can throw the marketeers a bone. Until then, piss off!

Honestly, it tickles me pink to see ad companies having a public sook about a company standing up for the end-user.

What is amazing is the level of arrogance these ad companies have to accuse apple of damaging the "infrastructure of the modern internet", and speaking as though they care at all about the consumer when if it meant that these ad companies could make even a single dollar more or could track people even a little bit more they would burn the internet to the ground to achieve that goal.

This is coming. Chrome is implementing a built in ad blocker.

Advertisers and content providers can either start getting used to the idea now and get ahead of the trend. Or they can watch their business model suffer and scramble to catch up later.

If I understood the workings of the intelligent tracking prevention correctly ( https://webkit.org/blog/7675/intelligent-tracking-prevention... ) then this looks painful for ad networks which don't serve their ads from a domain with lots of organic traffic. Google and facebook should be fine given that lots of users go there at least once a month.

Glad to see it happening, props to Apple actually standing up for their customers.

Then again, I'm sure it's fairly easy for a company that doesn't rely on scraping data from their customers.

A translation of the open letter from advertising companies to Apple:

  September 14, 2017

We're just now realizing what this means.

  An Open Letter from the Digital Advertising Community

"Community" means we're down to earth and neighborly.

  The undersigned organizations are leading trade associations 
  for the digital advertising and marketing industries, 
  collectively representing thousands of companies that 
  responsibly participate in and shape today’s digital 
  landscape for the millions of consumers they serve.

We sell ads. Lots of ads. So much money. We're "responsible" for certain definitions of responsible. Like your teenager is "responsible" for crashing your new Porsche into a ravine. Speaking of Porsches, have we mentioned how much money we make selling ads?

  We are deeply concerned about the Safari 11 browser update 
  that Apple plans to release, as it overrides and replaces 
  existing user-controlled cookie preferences with Apple’s own 
  set of opaque and arbitrary standards for cookie handling.

That 99% of users think a cookie is a type of desert is neither here nor there. And by "user-controlled", we mean "defaults that benefit us".

We're also annoyed they didn't ask us. We're a bit hit at parties.

  Safari’s new “Intelligent Tracking Prevention” would change 
  the rules by which cookies are set and recognized by 
  browsers. In addition to blocking all third-party cookies 
  (i.e. those set by a domain other than the one being 
  visited), as the current version of Safari does, this new 
  functionality would create a set of haphazard rules over the 
  use of first-party cookies (i.e. those set by a domain the 
  user has chosen to visit) that block their functionality or 
  purge them from users’ browsers without notice or choice.

"Haphazard" meaning "we disagree". Also, we 100% agree with user notice or choice, unless the user chooses to block ads or desires notice on how we're using their data. That's, uh... proprietary.

  The infrastructure of the modern Internet depends on 
  consistent and generally applicable standards for cookies, 
  so digital companies can innovate to build content, 
  services, and advertising that are personalized for users 
  and remember their visits. Apple’s Safari move breaks those 
  standards and replaces them with an amorphous set of 
  shifting rules that will hurt the user experience and 
  sabotage the economic model for the Internet.

Can we talk about innovative advertising for a minute? We're piloting this pop-up that completely replaces boring content and downloads an awesome new app automatically. That app then opens with videos on housewife inventions.

We've put a lot of hard work into sandwiching ourselves as the economic model for the internet, and it really grinds our gears that anyone would suggest there are other ways to make money besides working with us.

  Apple’s unilateral and heavy-handed approach is bad for 
  consumer choice and bad for the ad-supported online content 
  and services consumers love. Blocking cookies in this manner 
  will drive a wedge between brands and their customers, and 
  it will make advertising more generic and less timely and 
  useful. Put simply, machine-driven cookie choices do not 
  represent user choice; they represent browser-manufacturer 
  choice. As organizations devoted to innovation and growth in 
  the consumer economy, we will actively oppose any actions 
  like this by companies that harm consumers by distorting the 
  digital advertising ecosystem and undermining its 
  operations.

For example, how will users know which #brand to choose without advertising? How will our customers survive without us? Might as well shut down this whole internet thing.

  We strongly encourage Apple to rethink its plan to impose 
  its own cookie standards and risk disrupting the valuable 
  digital advertising ecosystem that funds much of today’s 
  digital content and services.

It's not like Apple's ever forged ahead with risky new business models or economic decisions before, and open letters are really effective, so we're confident this will work.

   Signed,

A whole bunch of acronyms.

To quote this fine article: http://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm

"Advertisers will tell you it has to be this way, but in dealing with advertisers you must remember they are professional liars."

If this their reaction to mere cookie blocking, I wonder how they'll react next year when Chrome starts blocking certain types of ads entirely.

Seems awesome. Hope Firefox does something similar.

https://adnauseam.io/ for safari when

I wonder if advertising companies will end up fighting for decades to protect their parasitic ways like big tobacco, oil companies etc.

You know who's not? B2B publishers. Because if this spreads, if you want to buy a niche market, you have to buy directly from that niche seller (for example, if you want to reach pig farmers, you'll need to buy ads on a pig farmer site -- it's the only way). So the ad networks hate it; direct sellers LOVE it.

The Law of Unintended Consequences may yet have the next laugh.

The thing about third party cookies that I really love is getting "targeted" ads, that make all banners all of a sudden have the appearance of saying something about you or what you have been doing, even when they don't.

Like the present you just secretly bought already for your wife being plastered all over your screen every site you visit. Or even better: "Ukrainian women want to meet you!". Yep yep. Must've searched for that, right? Didn't ya?

So.. I'm assuming Apple is not full on ignoring the `Set-Cookie` http response header, or persistent sessions as we know it are gone. ..Right?

I think targeted ads are boring. Or at least, the way they're often used is boring.

What benefit is there to keep showing me the same ads over and over for products I already use, websites I once visited, and products I once shopped for?

Show me quality ads for products and services that are new and interesting!

If these guys are pissed off, you know someone is doing something right.

hahaha - they're only just now getting upset?

Who are the members of the Advertising Bureau, American Advertising Federation, the Association of National Advertisers?

sounds like Apple is doing something right!

As someone who works partly in the ad ecosystem, all I can say is: YESSS!!!!

Why can’t the ad companies just use localStorage instead? Is that blocked too. I’m guessing this fucks up the Javascript paywall I’ve been building.

Good.

Url changed from https://news.slashdot.org/story/17/09/14/1739234/every-major..., which points to this.