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Comment by paulryanrogers | Hacker News Reader

Actually I'd say Apple is swinging only toward user choice where it suits them. The recent change to the default media player for play-pause away from the last app and to Apple Music is one example. Dropping Do-not-track from Safari is another.

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Expedia's privacy policy [0] is a perfect example of why DNT, in current form, does nothing more than misalign customer expectations around privacy.

"Do-Not-Track Signals and Similar Mechanisms. Some web browsers may transmit "do-not-track" signals to websites with which the browser communicates. Because of differences in how web browsers incorporate and activate this feature, it is not always clear whether users intend for these signals to be transmitted, or whether they even are aware of them. Participants in the leading Internet standards-setting organization that is addressing this issue are in the process of determining what, if anything, websites should do when they receive such signals. We currently do not take action in response to these signals. If and when a final standard is established and accepted, we will reassess how to respond to these signals."

[0] https://www.expedia.com/p/info-other/privacy-policy.htm

"Some cars are now coming straight from the factory with 'do not track' stickers already applied. As such, we cannot know for certain whether an individual driver actually wants to be tracked. What does Do Not Track really mean anyway? We have therefore chosen to attach tracking devices to all vehicles that visit our premises."

"Some letterboxes have 'no junk mail' signs attached, but it's often unclear whether these were even placed by the current occupant. The current resident may be completely unaware that they're missing out on our great deals. Therefore we have chosen to deliver to all addresses regardless of signage."

What an incredible way of thinking. You could rationalize anything this way.

They rationalise everything this way because their bottom line depends on it. They are incentivised not to understand.

Agree entirely. Take a clear statement. Say it isn't clear what someone may want from that statement, claiming it is confusing when it really is not. Do what is clearly the opposite intention, blaming deliberate stated confusion. Grrr.

No user actually wants to be tracked. Some users might want “relevant” ads, but nobody wants to be tracked.

Not sure how DNT fits into this. No advertiser respected this flag and, ironically, some used it to finger print a user's device.

Yeah, DNT was dead on arrival. I have no clue why the internet powers that be though that would be effective in any way. I guess its more of a feel good action.

It needs legislation behind it

Like "we use cookies, agree/disagree" irritating waste of space legislation that means nothing beyond the borders of wherever it was legislated?

The EU got it wrong with the popup aspect of cookies/GDPR legislation. It's just bad UX.

A DNT-style browser feature with legal weight behind it would have been miles better. Your browser could present a consistent interface for every website that requests consent, and allow you to set global defaults, etc.

The popup about cookies was the UK, wasn't it? Unless GDPR also happened a cookies thing afterwards, but the mandatory cookie popup was an out-of-touch plague on the internet for quite a while before GDPR was a thing.

The mandatory cookie popup was only necessary when websites created cookies not necessary for the proper function of the site. Of course, every website ended up using them for tracking, so people ended up having to click through cookie notices everywhere.

The GDPR popup of techchruch (source of the article) is so infuriation I refuse to visit the site. I've spend 5 minutes on it, and couldn't find a way to opt-out of tracking.

They are even doubly so irritating when you don't use cookies. Have to click through the rejections each and every time. Quite quickly a browsing pattern forms to avoid certain sites.

Safari already has this type of thing for a lot of other related features that require (or make sense to provide) user consent - but not cookies.

Maybe it's a harder issue to solve with a UI (third party cookies, subdomain cookies etc.) Maybe they just haven't gotten around to it (I used to set the global "site im visiting" cookie pref but since they added the "intelligent" cross site tracking protection that option seems to be gone..

Bingo

Or maybe it's just that someone needs to be fined for showing a useless GDPR Popup even though DNT was sent already. But I suspect with the recent W3C downgrade it's no industry standard so nobody can be forced to acknowledge it.

> The recent change to the default media player for play-pause away from the last app and to Apple Music is one example.

What are you referring to? The play/pause button has never been an "Apple Music" button, and in fact the recent behavioral change is to make it even more aggressively go to the current app (e.g. if you start playing a video in YouTube, the play/pause button controls that video instead of iTunes).

It doesn’t matter which app I last used - usually Spotify - when I get in my car the last song played in Apple Music plays. Annoying as hell.

iOS 12.1.2

Same here.

That’s usually an issue with the head unit or a weird interaction between the phone and the head unit. My old car used to auto play Music when it connected no matter what the source was on the head unit. My new one is better about not auto playing and respecting the last app.

Yes, that's my impression as well. As mentioned in a sibling post, the car where it's misbehaving seems to treat the phone more as a media storage backend than an audio source.

Also on iOS 12.1.2. I have never encountered this. I usually play audio in my car with either Pocket Casts or Spotify, and iOS reliably picks up on my last used app. I also have the Apple Music app deleted—maybe that plays into it?

Nope, not related. I have the music app and I use it. My head unit plays whatever I was listening to last. Usually my podcast app.

That’s only true if your last playing audio app isn’t killed in the background in the interim. If it’s gone the next time your HU asks for music, Apple Music gets used instead. So infuriating.

That's the case for one of my cars, not the other, but (without really knowing) I have a suspicion that it's actually the car doing this. There's a few cues on how its (now outdated) interface seems to want to act like its own full-fledged media playing device, with the phone as merely a backend storage, while my other car is more content to let the phone just act as more of an audio device with a few media controls (pause, skip...).

All of this is speculation.

I deleted the Music app and that stopped it. ️

Upgrading to a modern head unit also works but obviously costs more.

This is almost certainly due to the car trying to use the old iPod control protocol to tell your device to play. AFAIK that protocol just talks to the Music app, but it's also been obsolete for years.

Updated to 12.1.4 today, started listening to an audiobook in the Audible app, paused it, went to home screen & locked phone, got in my car, plugged in USB/lightning cable, started car, audiobook automatically began playing.

I have had it default to Apple Music when doing the same thing as above but with the YouTube app. I think it has something to do with YT not allowing background audio playback unless you sub to Premium. Which reminds me how much I miss Jasmine and ProTube.

I have only experienced this when swapping out to youtube or when the application I was playing music in previously gets closed to free up memory after a long period of time in the background idle (you can see this when the application appears to start up from scratch and doesn't resume from its previous position)

"Do-not-track" is just another data point advertisers use to track you. It's worse than a placebo.

> Dropping Do-not-track from Safari is another.

I’m not sure what you are referring to since Safari on desktop still has a DNT option in settings and while mobile safari doesn’t have a setting specifically labeled DNT it has a setting that appears to be the same thing with a more friendly name.

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