Apple should take the new Firefox Facebook extension and apply it by default to Safari. But also do Google and every other major ad-tech company. Not sure if this can be done without breaking the web though. Also not sure how different Firefox's extension is from Safari's Intelligent Tracking Prevention. It's possible they already do this.
Genuine question, I don't do much mobile development: aren't native apps able to collect just as much information as a web app/site? Except with a mobile app you can't just open a Dev console and see what requests are being made?
Again not trying to troll, I just don't know if I'm missing something here.
Now think about login pages, oauth flows, etc...
There are lots of opportunities to slurp data from a native app.
So there might be technical reasons why native apps are more privacy preserving than web apps, but I think that pales in comparison to having an actor that actually follows the principles of Privacy By Design running the platform [2]. If the platform owner doesn't actually want to vet what goes in their stores beyond "machine learning" [3], had a useless permission model until recently, or does dark pattern bullshit [4], I doubt there's much of a difference between native vs web apps.
At the end of the day the only thing that matters is incentives, and that informs how these actors will behave.
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2013/3/21/4133288/apple-to-finally-...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privacy_by_design
[3] https://gizmodo.com/google-boots-fake-ad-blockers-from-chrom...
[4] https://qz.com/1131515/google-collects-android-users-locatio...
Trick user to open FB or any site. Open the requested site in the built-in browser. Let user login to the site, and then scrap all the information. Apple and Google can't stop that.
You can't do that in the browser.
> A native app could leak/abuse information like a web app, but in general the surface area is way smaller for that to happen on iOS
If that's the case, the web is already broken.