Hacker News Reader

Comment by gnicholas | Hacker News Reader

One thing I've experienced with Apple's tracker blocking is that the WSJ guest pass doesn't persist across sessions. It's supposed to last for 7 days (and does on Chrome), but on Safari I have to enter it fresh every time. I wonder: if the WSJ took steps to make their guest pass persist, would Apple view this as a security vulnerability?

View on HN

If the tracking is done by a site you directly visit, no. Only cross-site tracking, like Google do to build ad profiles, is targeted for blocking.

I guess the next step for advertisers will be to enlist the websites themselves to send through more user data.

Huh, OK thanks for explaining. I think I actually understand why this was happening with the particular WSJ guest pass I was getting, and how it can be fixed. Thanks!

I’ve been thinking that SaaS companies that provide JS code to embed could work around this by letting you attach a subdomain; so instead Of the js pointing to say adroll.com, it would point to ads.adrollcustomer.com (with dns set up to goto adroll.)

This could probably work, but remember that there’s a lot of tracking that happens by programmatic ad exchanges. To get a sense of this, look at the dozens of sites in a media company’s ads.txt, e.g. https://cnn.com/ads.txt

A big player like Facebook could ask media companies to set up fb.cnn.com or similar, but I imagine this is where we start to enter “security vulnerability” territory, where Apple uses different heuristics to ban this approach.

I have a similar issue I think: I can't get YouTube to remember my Autoplay, Dark Mode and language settings at all, even though I'm logged in.

EDIT: Maybe not 'not at all', but it's remembered for a very short while anyway.

Even though you're logged in? This sounds like YouTube just being intentionally cruel to tracking-blocker users.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com