Apple blocking ads that follow users around web is 'sabotage', says industry
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
I would love to blow up the ad-revenue economic model of the internet. Sure some of the services it funds are convenient but the cost is pretty high. Just a few of these "costs" in my mind:
- Keeping people in a constantly mentally distracted state with various app notifications in order to serve them more ads
- Degredation of political discourse in a race to the rhetorical bottom because that approach appears to generate the most views and thus ad revenue
- More efficient sorting of people into tribal camps of group think. All as a consequence of content which agrees with their worldview because this content generates more ad revenue.
- Fundamental lack of control by users of their personal information as collected by these ad services
I don't know what would replace the ad model, but I'd be happy to find out.
Content worth consuming.
Content worth subscribing to consume.
A production pipeline that can put out enough enjoyable premium content for users. If its good, people will subscribe just to get access to a certain feature or series ala Giantbomb.
Giantbomb has this down pat- but it's taken years of content creation, and a CBS buyout to keep the doors open.
What it can do is make you pretty damn appealing when you go up for sale, if you have the active, paying subscriber base.
That's why Giantbomb is still around and is seemingly surrounded by the of corpses of those who tried the subscription model, but simply couldnt keep subscribers subscribing.
That's rich. Wonder which genius came up with those wordings in the complaint.
Are ads really the majority of the revenues generated on the internets?
But the short answer is that I'm irritated by how ads have become the focus and content has become the excuse to get people to see the ads. Ever gone through a magazine like that? Where the articles and such are all just fluff so they can call it a magazine, but really it's just a book of ads.
Netflix, is a response to, among other things, TV commercials and 30 minutes of ads before a movie at a theatre. I think Internet ads are going the same way. Clearly people don't want them. Clearly efforts to hide ads are having a serious impact to the bottom line. So content providers need to evolve. I like the Patreon model a lot.
It's not just jamming banner ads everywhere, there's a lot you can do to increase revenue with advertising and referrals.
Marketing in the 2000s/'10s has really turned disgusting. Whereas many moons ago marketing was just about giving your brand an image, and making people aware of it - it has now turned into an all out psychological assault.
Additionally, we seem to be seeking out every way possible to bombard each other with it. Remember when someone figured out that you're stuck standing near the pump when you purchase gas for your vehicle, so they put tv screens with sound blaring at us there where we can't escape it? I mean, you're in the middle of making a reasonable transaction (money, for gas) - but you still have to be turned into the product for marketers to assault now, just because you can. In the same vein, I've heard there's a CO based startup working on bringing similar advertising to ski lifts - another venue where you can't escape.
We really need to take a stand on this (as Apple is), as the internet is just one of many spaces where marketing can and will massively infringe on your privacy. Google Maps seems to track your physical location constantly (so you can "see where you parked"!) - how long, if not already, until they notice that I've visited a dry cleaner, or gone to Home Depot, so they can use that info to continue the onslaught?
Excuse me, but what world are you living in? Marketing has been an "all out psychological assault" since the ~1930s. See toothpaste.
This week I wanted to change address, but Google wouldn't let me unless I give access to all location, web and app activity.
Ugh. As a long-time "all in on Macs" person I've dreaded the day this would happen. As much as I am an Apple whore, the world is worse off when important things are too tightly bound to monopoly players. It's not like I want to ONLY ever have the option of buying Apple products.
I am, however, glad that these values are being "proven right" in society and culture. I just wish they would percolate up through Big Tech more.
the new specs for the Mac Book pro are also a joke for the price, and wtf is that touch bar crap.
also, paying 800-1000$ for a phone is ridiculous
- Also the Google Pixel is $749.
Yes, of course. These two statements are not mutually exclusive.
Ignoring the hyperbole ("evil"? Really?) all removing the headphone jack was was proactively responding to market forces (because BT headphones have outsold wired for a while now) as it gave them more leeway in industrial design (the port is large and repeats functionality the other port already has anyhow).
> all of the monopolistic app store practices really aren't awesome.
You don't understand what "monopolistic" practices are. Sorry. Apple controls their own platform but that's not monopolistic.
> the new specs for the Mac Book pro are also a joke for the price
Not if you compare like for like it's not. Sorry, doesn't hold up under even a cursory examination of the competition.
> wtf is that touch bar crap.
Awesome is what it is - I have one and it's freaking great.
> also, paying 800-1000$ for a phone is ridiculous
That's literally the price range of most major high-end smart phones (ok, $700-$1000, but still). The flagship phones from Samsung, HTC, and Huawei are in that range. You have to go to LG or Oppo (much much smaller sales and they are selling at a loss) to get below that (and only into the $600 range, even then).
They are the ones that might currently do less than the other two, but history shows that giving one company too much power means it will be abused sooner or later. Google seemed a really, really nice company in the late nineties. When it developed, people were fascinated. When the first versions of Android came out, I was coding like a crazy, happy to own an "open phone" I could simply copy MP3s and ebooks to. And look what a monster they became. Now I do whatever I can to get rid of Google from every aspect of my life, and believe me, it's not easy at all.
The writing on the wall has been there for a long time. They just had a very large stockpile of goodwill.
But it got SO MUCH worse around 2005 for some reason.
That's such an odd idea. I'm not sure how you arrive at it.
Apple, in this case, is simply setting itself up as a gatekeeper for advertising. Just like Apple is the gatekeeper at the app store who takes 30% of everything.
Apple isn't going to stop ads. It's going to charge advertisers a cut to reach Safari users. In the process, it claims to protect users of Safari from the "evil" cookies. Essentially, they're taking shots at Google's business model and trying to get a cut of Google's income at the same time. It's purely a money grab.
This is also great news for server side trackers. This will be a big boost for their business.
http://static5.businessinsider.com/image/59289f0379474ce7238...
Diversification doesn't hurt. Especially if it's at the expense of one of your largest competitors. Especially when your core market is mobile phones. Ask Motorola or Nokia about how being #1 in phones works out in the long run.
And it's well diversified. It's third largest business is Macintosh, which is the fastest growing and most profitable personal computer company in the world.
Apple does plenty of evil, as you're about to find out when you realize the amount of freedom you enjoy on your Mac will not in any way translate to your iPhone, and further discover the business model to which Apple would want to gravitate (hint: not the Mac model).
They're arguably less evil than Google and Microsoft right now, but to say that they're "adhering to 'do no evil'" is by no means accurate when they still push their walled garden and treat their mobile users as incompetent children needing their hands held.
-2 : I don't really see Apple as very different from Amazon or Google or any other tech giant. They are here to defend their bottom line and IMO they have remarked that ads were an easy critique of their rival so they are tabling on it.
If only they could :
- stop changing their TOS every 5 minutes and make them actually human readable.
- let anybody distribute an app on iOS, even outside of the app store, even if it competes with iTunes, Safari, etc
I would be way more inclined to cheer for Apple and call them a defender of our liberties. Another issue is that as far as net neutrality is concerned, this is scary.
That said, I fully support Apple in their pro-privacy stance. Now if only they'd produce professional notebooks/equipment, I'd be re-considering them for my next purchase (having owned a PowerBook from 2003 onwards, and still using a Mac mini for graphic work).
This is stated as if it were fact, when it is clearly an opinion with many complicated factors behind it that vary from person to person.
I'm curious to see what develops from Apple's stated intention to keep more user data on-device and the company's attempts at 'differential privacy', and if these stances disadvantage Apple against its competitors.
Sounds great right!
Except this is bordering against net neutrality.
You see, like with net neutrality, Apple could offer services in the future to companies to get a "free pass" on their cute filter. This means people who want to advertise their innocent little game, have no chance against companies with a lot of money who can afford to do so.
If you are in favor off this update, but against for example net neutrality, then you might want to check up again on how well you understand these concepts, and how they could play out in unfavorable division of power.
tldr; Monopoly is inherently unfavorable, not just theoretically but has proven so time and time again in many different sectors.
Microsoft used their position to do things like:
Spend over $1 billion to advertise a free web browser to compete with Netscape (fear of cross-platform applications that Netscape could support).
Embraced a fucked up version of web standards where they literally did the exact opposite of what the specs said in order to make sites compatible for their users break (without serious dev effort) for everyone else.
Convinced Compaq (memory fuzzy, I get them and HP mixed up now) to not release computers with BeOS. If they had, MS was going to eliminate their favorable Windows licensing costs. This would have driven them out of business as they could not achieve competitive PC prices with reasonable margins (PCs already being a low margin business at that point). They tried similar, though less aggressive, pushes against companies that later wanted to release Linux workstations.
There's a whole litany of MS's abuses of its monopoly position in the anti-trust suit, it was actually fascinating reading if you care about economics, business, politics.
[0] Precise numbers failing me, I believe they got close to 97% at some point.
As a user, I welcome Apple's new feature, and I'm fine with it being the default.
Are they? That's not really their approach to many things. It seems to me they are making decisions for users. I have nothing of note to say on this specific change, but we should be careful about where we want "neutrality" applied in our network go-betweens (be them ISPs, devices, whatever).
The essence of neutrality concerns is the absence of control. Whether an ISP allows you to turn off the on-by-default traffic shaping or whether a device lets you turn off the on-by-default cookie restrictions is not the concern. It's whether these go-betweens make decisions for us, such as cookie sharing parameters, video downsampling, etc.
This has nothing to do with net neutrality directly at all. The parallel it does share, is giving Apple a potential position of power to decide which data goes through and which don't. This is also the essence off the net neutrality debate.
Their proposed "filter" could even very well be perfectly to my liking and in line with my personal standards for ads or how they are brought upon me.
This is however about them providing a code, or at the very least a seed off their own for their machine learning algorithm to filter content.
I like experiments, but I rather do not wish Apple or any singular entity for that matter to regulate my content.
I do hold bias against Apple, because they have a certain position. They gave everyone phones, ecosystem for devs and patents and rights and indirect control to web frameworks through licences. Their might be conflict off interest. They have so much (acces to) people's data already through their devices and market influence, that I do not feel fully comfortable about them deciding that now the rest is not allowed to gain similar data.
People tend to default naturally to what requires the least effort to work;
- This feature is default on their browser.
- Other browsers are disliked or simply not used on IPhones for the big majority off users.
- Their browser is realistically thus the main gate way used by people with Iphones to access the internet, aside from the social media apps.
- At this early layer between people and the internet, Apple wants to place a machine learning algorithm, that decides which data is let through and which isn't.
I am not sure about if I want them to have that position off power at all so closely to what is for many their main and potentially only access point to the internet.
If you want to discuss the ramifications of browser features for the net, by all means do so, but don't try to paint my approval of both net neutrality and this Apple feature as somehow being inconsistent or indicating that I don't understand what's going on.
If you disagree, could you point to any reply which contains your arguments or views on the actual topic within your previous posting towards my comment?
That's what makes it not a net neutrality issue? To continue the analogy, if my ISP decides to limit traffic from some non-paying upstream provider, but makes it a user configurable option, it's also hardly a net neutrality issue? So I haven't lost any control over what I can access because the option exists, right?
Net neutrality is a two-way street, not just about users. This one is just more favorable to most of us because we like the result. Same way with Google's safe browsing lists and other things. But we can't pretend there's neutrality here like there would be if the browser was completely hands off. Sure it may not be "net neutrality" as defined by only network providers, but the concept of neutrality spans more than the network.
As I understand this feature, Apple will not be excluding their own services' cookies from it. This is not an anticompetive act. It is not an anticonsumer act. And as you have the choice to turn it off, it is not an impediment to your ability to consume and degrade your privacy by allowing advertisers into your life.
Yes it would. Net neutrality basically says "regardless of what users ask for or what providers provide them, they can't give preferential treatment to some companies over others".
I do agree that, since this is on-device and not targeted definitely is the right way to go and alleviates many net neutrality concerns. But the closed classifier, the choice of 30 days, etc and that this is a single browser doing it on a device where they allow no other browser just gives me a slippery slope feeling that Apple can unilaterally choose which default parameters users browse under outside of web standardization.
I think the 3rd party cookie thing is a bit of a red herring anyways. If ad networks weren't so stupid, they'd use first party cookies and correlate unique identifiers on the backend. Even when done w/ minimal fingerprinting (which iOS is exempt from most forms of due to its user base consistency) and IP tracking (which iOS also more exempt on cell networks than home ISPs), it can be quite effective.
You can have other browsers on iOS. They don't perform as well, and I do disagree with Apple over that decision. But they do exist.
> You can have other browsers on iOS. They don't perform as well, and I do disagree with Apple over that decision. But they do exist.
What other engine can I use other than mobile Safari? Maybe I wasn't clear with "browser". I mean as in no Apple code, my own rendering engine, etc so that Apple can't make decisions about what it does.
If you want to run something with no Apple code, don't run iOS. Otherwise you are running the non-FLOSS code and trusting them at some level. It seems silly to distrust webkit because it is "Apple code" (which is FLOSS) and yet trust iOS (which is not FLOSS)
However, if the filtering is done (even opt-in at your request) by the network, that is a network neutrality violation. Making that filter opt-out rather than opt-in is better, but both are still technically network neutrality violations
To come back to your analogy, this filtering is being done by your device. It is not being done by Apple directly so it is not directly analogous.
Indirectly analogizing to the intent behind Net Neutrality, there is a point to be made about giving established players more of an advantage. I am assuming that Apple is going to make this an opt-out option. That certainly lends weight to the concern that this can make Apple into a gatekeeper for advertisers / trackers. If this option were opt-in this would be much less of an issue (and have much less of an effect).
Other than opt-in vs. opt-out and market share, I don't see any fundamental difference between this and any other ad blocker or privacy protecting tool that maintains a white or black list.
You realize that reliable VoIP requires ISP side traffic shaping, right?