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Comment by notatoad | Hacker News Reader

>It shows Apple actively seceding an opportunity for exchanging marketing data in favour of user privacy.

Apple isn't ceding anything here. They still have your email address, they have the record of your activity on the site you're accessing. They are withholding your email address from the site you're accessing, which is good for your privacy. But you make it sound like they've sacrificed something in doing that.

If google had done this, everybody would be up in arms about how google was further overreaching in their goal to gain complete control of the internet and are preventing poor little mom and pop websites from being able to meet their marketing goals.

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So I take it that you didn't watch the video or read the transcript where they state explicitly that they don't record or track that information.

Just because you believe the FB/G nonsense that the internet is only possible by gross violations of user privacy doesn't mean everyone else buys into it.

They have to store the information, if for nothing else than to correctly forward emails to your real address.

The mapping but not necessarily the user's activity.

All they have to record is alias->real in a giant table.

They don't need to record what app or service got the alias address, and they explicitly state that they do not record any details about interaction with your service, or any emails that go through the alias. It's an explicit statement in the linked talk.

When someone starts forwarding illegal content via these accounts the feds will ensure that the recipients are disclosed.

What?

Which accounts doing what?

Businesses sending to a cloaked email?

They have a list of what websites i sign into with my Apple ID. Which is more information than they used to have. If you switch from signing in with your email address to signing in with your apple ID, that's one more entity that knows about that relationship than otherwise would.

I'm not trying to say this is a bad thing, I love what apple's doing here. I'm just trying to push back against any suggestions that apple is giving something up. They are collecting more data about their users now than they were previously, and positioning themselves as the gatekeeper of user identity. There's every indication that they're doing this for the right reasons, and it's good for users, but it still increases their control and their stored user data.

To me this suggests then that the absolute amount of data collected isn’t necessarily a useful metric

I'm not quite sure what kind of metric you're referring to, but Apple is simply centralizing data collection of its ecosystems. The incentive is more comfortable service interaction and less entities receiving information about you.

On the other hand, Apple is tightening its control over its own ecosystems as every interaction has to go through them. Moreover, they're inhibiting anonymous usage of services as more and more things required direct or indirect verification of the user. This entices the market to normalize the demand for unique virtual identities.

Apple's business model is selling hardware, not selling advertising. It's not really a sacrifice for them. It's a "strategy credit" https://stratechery.com/2013/strategy-credit/

They don’t have a “record of your activity.” They only know that you have signed in with Apple on a site. They aren’t tracking your behavior or usage. The Apple JS doesn’t have to be on any page except the sign up/in.

And you don't have to use the Apple JS if you don't want to, since it's really just a library to download the appropriate button image and to do OIDC.

> If google had done this,

Google provides a similar thing as an OAuth/OpenID provider. (except they track all that stuff and share the email with the site/app).

And you know, don't currently have a monopoly on iOS application distribution that it could use to strong arm developers on their platform to always make using it an option.

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