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Comment by lapnitnelav | Hacker News Reader

Yeah let's not even mention the super low count of campaigns and conversions an advertiser can have at any given time.

Some of the advertisers we work with have pretty small budget, i.e. less than 50k/month and even them will probably max out the 64 campaigns.

I'm all for having a privacy minded advertising industry but this proposal misses the mark big time.

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The way I see it, the ad industry “survived” just fine when relying only on print ads and other mechanisms that had no concept of automatically-logged impressions. Ad companies do not have an inherent right to abuse tech just because tech exists.

Ignoring the advertisers for a moment, it's obvious that companies have a legitimate interest in knowing what portion of their ad spend is reaching people who eventually become customers. If the tech evolves to the point where that metric is knowable by some means that also respects consumer privacy, then that could be a net win.

It helps that Apple doesn't rely on advertisers for the bulk of their revenue, so they can actually pursue this sort of thinking without gutting their business.

Exactly this. If the industry has found there is no way to have solid and accurate tracking while maintaining user privacy, then the answer shouldn’t be the loss of privacy, the answer should be you can’t have that level of tracking.

This number doesn't necessarily have to remain 6 bits but note that if it got up to 32 bits it would be enough to contain a unique user ID (or even a unique ID for a specific click) which removes all privacy benefits.

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