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Preparing Our Partners for iOS 14

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259 pointsdanielamitay301 comments

> We believe that industry consultation is critical for changes to platform policies, as these updates have a far-reaching impact on the developer ecosystem.

Why should platform makers consult the advertising industry? It's not like the advertising industry consulted anybody before they started collecting every bit of data they could.

Because many of the people developing apps for their platform rely on advertising revenue to pay the bills?

If the app makers were merely showing an ad , even an intrusive one without selling out my information -- I will be able to tolerate that.

However when app developers include libraries from foursquare or facebook, what they are doing is violating the users' privacy and selling their information to third party aggregators who will apply data analytics to build a full predictive model of your behavior and then they will sell it to anybody who wants to spy on you. Do you remember Cambridge Analytica ?

FB has done plenty wrong but you can make the point without upping the hyperbole as well.

There is a danger of FB manipulating things on its own but they didn't sell the data to any third party including Cambridge Analytica, it was harvested because of poor API policy(your friend auth giving access to some of your details) which was fixed in the future. The behavioral profiles were built by Cambridge Analytica on its own by the data it stole.

Why would FB in any instance even sell your data? I would argue it is in FB's interest to keep the data for itself, not letting anyone have it and be the gatekeeper.

The right thing to argue is, whether you want FB/Tiktok itself to have the treasure trove of data or not, and whether you want to allow them to use that to do precise targeting.

> it was harvested because of poor API policy which was fixed in the future

Is there any evidence that it was actually fixed?

They had a bunch of blog posts about restricting APIs like this[1]. I think someone can look at the current APIs and see what related friends information they allow. The last time I used FB APIs was in 2012 and the last time I used FB was in 2014, so not up to date with them.

[1] https://about.fb.com/news/2018/04/restricting-data-access/

I believe they made modifications after that, yes.

But if you believe they don't still provide access via substantially similar APIs to "trusted partners", I have a bridge that may interest you...

I suppose in a way they are monetizing/selling the use of your data because they're collecting it and selling the aggregation of that data back to advertisers.

Sure, it's not a selling of the raw data record but with advertising and targeting an advertiser can get pretty close.

Yeah, that targeting bit is fine to argue and I tried to infer that with my comment as well.

I just have an issue with hyperboles like "sold individual user's behavioral profile to Cambridge Analytica" being thrown around in articles related to tech when in HN of all places, you can argue without resorting to that.

Yes, I imagine saying things that aren't quite true may at scale cause people to disbelieve the real arguments.

It won't prevent them to show ads. It will prevent them to show targeted ads. So your point is either invalid or rather "they won't be able to be datamining their potentials users to pay the bills" ?

Advertisers are willing to pay way more for targeted ads. If an app is relying on advertising revenue, the inability to target ads will directly cause the app to generate less revenue.

The solution here is to outlaw targeted advertising, so that marketing budgets can realign to appropriately pay for normal advertising again.

As it is, the efficacy of targeted advertising is a myth. Google claimed in a blog post that their own internal study showed over a 50% benefit in targeted advertising for publishers... but an independent, academic study showed a difference of about 4%.

https://techcrunch.com/2019/05/31/targeted-ads-offer-little-...

https://services.google.com/fh/files/misc/disabling_third-pa...

(Google has suggested, of course, that their wildly different outcomes are because you know, Google has data nobody else has, and obviously Google would never manipulate it's exclusive access to all that data to make studies look like what is best for their business.)

Adtech giants need advertisers to believe they need targeted advertising, because targeted advertising relies on mass data collection only they are capable of getting. If people realized the necessity of using Google and Facebook's mass user data was... a complete lie... any old ad firm could compete with their businesses.

> outlaw targeted advertising

You're thinking too small. Targeted advertising deserves to die in a grease fire, but a proper solution is to universally make an individual's personal data their property and require companies to cough up compensation every time it is used in commercial form. Any attempt to sidestep the compensation must account as fraud.

Holding on to user data needs to be a painful liability. The cost of such micro-accounting alone should incentivise companies to keep hold of as little information as possible, so as not to incur excess processing costs. The aggregated cost of payment processing on top of that will provide a secondary cost vector and further discourage using such data. Combine with GDPR and CCPA like power to demand companies to divulge their full accounting details of your data, and all of a sudden the pain becomes real. Not to mention very expensive.

>Adtech giants need advertisers to believe they need targeted advertising, because targeted advertising relies on mass data collection only they are capable of getting. If people realized the necessity of using Google and Facebook's mass user data was... a complete lie... any old ad firm could compete with their businesses.

Targeted advertising is as old as advertising. Why do you have cloud companies advertising on the billboards in San Francisco, but not in Beatty, Nevada? Why do you have coupons? Why Cosmopolitan has different ads than Linux Format? Why NBA games have different ads than The Bachelor?

Why do companies spend more and more money with companies that do provide better targeted advertising? Do you really believe that P&G spends billions of dollars on advertising, without understanding which forms of it are effective?

There's a valid discussion to be had about scope, allowed sophistication of targeted advertising that should be allowed, and regulations about it, but claiming it doesn't work just shows lack understanding of the topic.

> Why do you have cloud companies advertising on the billboards in San Francisco, but not in Beatty, Nevada?

To be fair, I think I should specify "user-targeted" advertising. Targeting by content/placement location isn't privacy-invading by nature. :)

Targeting by placement and location are just proxy for user targeted ads, due to lack of better abilities. Gives you very broad targeting criteria - like San Francisco is likely to have people interested in cloud. Cosmopolitan is likely to have middle age women readers, etc. User-targeted advertising gives you much higher granularity, which makes ads campaigns more effective for advertisers.

Is privacy invading targeted advertising a concern and something that needs more debate? Yes. Can it be creepy and cause harm in some cases? Yes. Should world be driven by advertisers ROI? No. Are user-targeted ads ineffective? Hell no.

But also, just because something is concerning and bad for some aspects of the life (like privacy), it doesn't mean it should be wiped out of the floor, as cheaper and effective advertising does help to grow any capitalist economy. Trade-offs are needed (same as we don't ban oil, even tho it's bad for environment), and it'll become more regulated (either self-regulated by industry, or by governments), but it's not going to disappear.

>The solution here is to outlaw targeted advertising

Thanks, but no. As an end user, my preference goes as:

no advertising >>>>> targeted advertising >> untargeted advertising

And I am not just speaking hypothetically. Google has a switch in your account settings where you can flip a toggle to turn off all targeted Google advertising and make it un-targeted. I couldn't last more than a day with this and flipped the toggle back on.

While with targeted advertising, most ads were useless, they at least were somewhat relevant, and a few even piqued my interest. With untargeted advertising, I was getting absolute trash that was actively annoying me.

I don't care.

It's my phone, not the developers, not the advertisers, mine.

If you want a device which is subsidized by and encourages advertising and tracking, you have Android or Amazon's devices.

> it's my phone not the developers, not the advertisers, mine.

Are you willing to extend this argument to Apple as well? Do you also think that it is not Apple's phone, and that you should be able to do what you want with it, if you choose to?

Because right now Apple does not really agree with your opinion that it is your phone, that you can do what you want with.

Irrelevant to the current discussion.

It is absolutely relevant to your stated idea of "it's my phone".

Because it really is not "your phone", because of Apple's actions.

Either you think it is your phone or you don't.

People who buy an Apple device often do so in part because Apple does a better job with privacy. The fact that this makes life harder for advertisers is kind of the point.

Do newspapers need to know what websites every subscriber visits in order to put ads in the paper?

The idea that privacy needs to be conceded in order for a healthy ad market to exist is false.

Not sure about "healthy", but un-targeted advertising is a total waste of money, unless you're some big generic brand.

High-value advertising revenue generally comes from very specific brands targeting very specific users.

Of course you can do certain kinds of targeted advertising without user profiles, but I don't see how that would work on Facebook.

On Facebook, information that users voluntarily and explicitly provide is fair game for targeting IMHO. The rest should come from the content of the page.

If by "explicitly" you subsume "knowingly" then I agree.

I prefer explicitly.

Facebook has a pretty good idea where I am by looking at the data associated with my connection. I know they have that, but if I don't want them to use that for advertising, they shouldn't.

In this case how does real-world advertising in magazines, public transport, TV, etc manages to have such a high price despite the targeting capabilities being orders of magnitude lower than online?

Maybe the problem with online ads isn't the targeting or lack thereof but that the well has been poisoned by allowing even the worst possible scum and the users reached their breaking point and learned to ignore them, while the higher quality in real-world advertising is enough to even keep people paying for advertising (in the form of buying magazines)?

> In this case how does real-world advertising in magazines, public transport, TV, etc manages to have such a high price despite the targeting capabilities being orders of magnitude lower than online?

Some companies are willing to pay that much more for the prestige of showing up in the "real world", just like some brands might maintain unprofitable flagship stores.

Another reason is "because they have to charge that much". Which means that if fewer companies are willing to pay that much, more classic media outlets go out of business, as they can not lower prices further.

Lastly, you can't accurately measure how inefficient these forms of advertising are, whereas online advertising makes it easy to see whether ads are a net loss or not.

> Some companies are willing to pay that much more for the prestige of showing up in the "real world"

Doesn't that show a problem with online advertising if it's considered so bad that companies are willing to pay huge premiums to show up somewhere else instead?

Does it not depend on context? For example, you don’t need to know anything about the user of a recipe website to know they are hungry and once they pick a recipe, some basic notion of what they are looking for.

On top of that, extremely course information can be gathered without tracking users. For example, you can probably get a country level location and maybe even language from the request the browser sends.

You don't need to know anything about a person to know that, at some point, they'll be hungry. So, if you're some company that happens to sell food nationally, you can just throw your ad at anybody. That's what I mean by "big generic brand".

However, if you sell, say, artisanal hot sauce, you'd pay more to target an affluent person that likes spicy food, rather than some random person that may be just be googling how to make macaroni and cheese.

I can buy ads generically on a site, but what happens after the user clicks on the ad or just views the ad and then buys the product? How do you keep track of this when you can't measure the effect? The only way is to measure some form of before/after analysis of your conversions with or without the marketing campaigns... Too much noise to be able to do that on the web.

Sure. As long as the flip side of that argument is equally appreciated - ad revenue pays for the apps, so less revenue will necessarily lead to fewer "free" apps and/or fewer "free" features and/or worse quality. It's a rational response of the intermediary (i.e. app makers) to the customers (i.e. advertisers) having less access to the product (i.e. us).

free != quality

ads == worse quality

Ad-funded apps are usually garbage. Prime example is the Facebook app, or Messenger.

> less revenue will necessarily lead to fewer "free" apps and/or fewer "free" features and/or worse quality

I agree with "fewer" and strongly disagree with "worse quality."

What's the incentive to spend money to constantly improve, fix bugs and update the features on every OS release? If you consider the entire development lifecycle, quality costs developer money every bit just as much as new features.

Is it wrong that I’ve consistently had better experiences with paid apps than advertising supported apps? Perhaps it has something to do with the alignment of incentives.

Anyway, I don’t begrudge anyone who has worked in the ad business, but I do wonder if folks might be happier optimizing for something of real lasting value in comparison to the gambling business.

Newspapers had plenty of ad revenue before tracking. Apps could be monetized by ads that are targeted based on the in-app content only.

Then why did they almost all go bankrupt?

Some went bankrupt because one can't store a forest into a memory card. It's all about costs. A physical newspaper costs a lot more to produce than a blog, and doesn't scale like one as well: even printing a handful of copies would cost a lot more than serving millions of people through a blog.

Craigslist, basically.

Classified ads were the difference between profit and loss for a lot of local newspapers. Craigslist devastated that market in a matter of years.

Commercial ads were doing fine, and I bet there are a lot of local businesses who wish there was still a local newspaper they could advertise in. But it wasn't enough.

Good, the app market is flooded with crap anyway

> The idea that privacy needs to be conceded in order for a healthy ad market to exist is false.

You can't in practice verify that clicks or impressions are real, as opposed to initiated by bots, without correlating them with real human behavior.

If you have an idea for how to verify a click or impression was real without also gathering some kind of data, go make ten billion dollars selling that technology.

That's why you don't pay per click or impression. The newspaper/magazine model has worked fine for 100 years.

I fully understand why advertising companies would be opposed to this, it's in direct opposition to their value prop. As a consumer, though, I don't want anyone who is not the entity I'm interacting with to know anything about me.

There is a reason why the news paper industry moved in the direction that they did. Or do you think they were forced to move this way? Measurement on the web can be more precise and allows to understand the impact of revenue, it's also vastly more distributed than magazines and TV channels of which there's only thousands or so for each while there are literally millions of websites. There's too much noise and fraud on the web to be able to make marketing decisions with little tracking. The W3C is working with Google on establishing what it would take to accomplish this stuff without sharing data, this isn't the approach apple took with its platform in plain disregard for all the apps that run on it, but than again at this point this shouldn't surprise anyone.

> There's too much noise and fraud on the web to be able to make marketing decisions with little tracking.

I think you give too little credit to the intelligence of ad buyers. They can figure out if a web ad is working the same way they can figure out if a billboard ad is working.

I've been working with tens of thousands of them for 15 years. To name one area: last click attribution being the primary way people measure web performance is a prime sign that they are at least confused with how performance works. Advertising measured with last click tends to focus towards people that have visited your site less than 4 hours earlier, hardly something that is incremental to the sales of a business, and basically all research and experiments that you can run point to this, but it doesn't change the fact ad buyers all believe last click is the one true way. And to show that it's not just me saying this: https://research.netflix.com/business-area/marketing-and-gro... .

I understand that they want more information, but they don't need it. Ask your clients how they evaluate the performance of offline ads. Those same analytical techniques work online as well.

I think super-precise attribution would actually kill the advertising industry. The uncertainty is what allows ad-buyers to purchase spots well below their value. The uncertainty is what leads to money being spread around and supporting the most things.

It's a little like insurance. If insurance companies could precisely target rates, you would end up paying basically exactly what your health care costs are and maybe a little more. Insurance works because of uncertainty and large pools of customers.

> You can't in practice verify that clicks or impressions are real, as opposed to initiated by bots, without correlating them with real human behavior.

Track purchases coming from ads?

It's my phone, not the developer's. I should absolutely have the right to disable this kind of tracking on my phone. If the advertisers/ developers want to track people, maybe they should start buying people phones or do what Google did and build an OS and give it away.

TBF, not all Android phones are created equal.

There are Android phones sold in the developing world at low price points where ads appear on home screen, notification bar etc. with tracking deep within OS.

Then, there are phones like Pixel where with recent versions you have control of what is shared and you need to authorize access(single/multiple use) for things like location. Like iOS, not much can be collected unless you give Google/app permission to.

Fair enough.

I probably shouldn't have mentioned Android at all because it's not about phone brand so much as it is my right to tell advertisers no.

It’s also a conflict of interest: when they’re interacting with that industry and advocating for things are they doing so on behalf of selling ads for Facebook or for the publishers on their platform?

Facebook believes that creating an open and connected world is good. Anything that contributes to Facebook's growth a small tax to pay.

This is what Mark Zuckerberg says at government hearings.

I'm honestly interested about this, Facebook is a big company.

Is there no case of FB screwing over its partners? Like locking or limiting an API that they had offered in the past, etc.

One thing that comes to mind immediately is that Facebook Messenger used to be accessible through XMPP and then they blocked that.

At one point, I wrote a script to crawl developer documentation at Google, Facebook, and Microsoft, and compare vs. the previous day so we could know ahead of time about breaking API changes.

So yes, it's funny to me that Facebook is calling out Apple for changing their platform when Facebook does it all the time.

And they love to do so without much or any notice to developers.

I mean, at one time you could build apps on Facebook that basically downloaded all of a user's data when they used it. The Obama campaign built an app that you could use to find your Facebook friends who hadn't been contacted by the campaign yet, so you could call them on the campaign's behalf. I heard of other political operations that built a "wish [famous person] happy birthday" app solely so they could grow their database.

Eventually Facebook closed all that access down and basically deprecated the concept of FB as an app platform entirely. That is a way more dramatic change than what Apple is doing to Facebook here.

Wasn’t this closed in response to the Cambridge Analytica scandal?

A person associated with Cambridge Analytica used a researcher access and shared the data with the company (which he wasn't supposed to do). Researchers have (had?) more access than developers do.

Not true, they didn't have any special research access. There was an app called "This is your digital life" that was just a personality quiz that they used to scrape data. At this point facebook would let you access data about a users friends in detail when the user would authorize it (via these apps).

Also facebook killed this long before the Cambridge Analytics scandal broke. It also enabled some really cool features like their graph search where you could run queries like "people in X town that like football", but it also let you run very creepy queries to stalk people, which is why it got canned.

This type of FB app was gone long before the CA scandal broke. There were some really cool ones available, but plainly not worth the tradeoff in retrospect.

The scandal in Cambridge Analytica was roughly that they were able do this stuff after FB made it officially against the rules.

"able" is bearing a lot of load.

FB never built technical countermeasures, merely asked app devs to pinky-swear not to siphon user data.

This is a perfect example of the tradeoffs between openness and privacy.

If you give dangerous tools to users, you will have a few cool things and lots of tech-illiterate users screwed over.

Privacy advocates often preach solutions like the fediverse, without understanding that the fediverse is a privacy disaster for the tech illiterate. Cambridge Analytica wouldn't even be preventable on Mastodon, and it would have far worse consequences. Nevermind admins snooping on messages of their users, for i.e. romantic or financial reasons and poor people having to pay for their own services instead of seeing ads.

Yes, Facebook is horrible, but all currently known cures are worse than the disease.

It’s like the Drake equation - you will have to multiply with the risk that FB goes truly rogue. If they do, they have ALL dirt.

what's your opinion of Scuttlebutt and if poor, do you see any progress towards alternatives on the horizon?

I had an early fb app that let you track shows from a band you had been to and display this on your wall.

I was able to download tons of user data. I think the guide was to only take what you need and you were not supposed to store it longer than 48 hours.

But that was def an honor system thing and I’d be surprised if people were purging data back then. It was (still is?) the Wild West with consumer tracking.

Facebook's entire graph API significantly undermined what developers could do compared to the old API when it rolled out in 2011 or 2012. I was working for a social media advertising company at the time and it was certainly detrimental. They didn't consult with us, the industry using their API.

As a developer currently working for a faceless Corp that never seems to actually consult with it’s users (in a mostly unrelated industry) for any user impactful choice..I’m sorry.

I would say maybe you could take comfort in knowing that you essentially sponsored someone who wanted to help produce a world of clean, adaptable code, but the truth is I’m just another mid-rate dev producing immense value to an ironically named faceless org.

Anyway, no thanks for ads and surveillance tech but at the same time thanks for keeping me employed and thanks for keeping the viability of these pursuits going I think?

IFTTT used to be able to post to a Facebook user's wall by API. They disabled this API a couple years ago.

I'd say they shut down quite a few "partners" when they shuttered Parse.

You used to be able to fetch public events (not for a user, not private events, just public events that you can easily browse to anonymously) and I had made a site that showed everything that was going on in my city. It was fantastic, you could see all concerts/gigs/plays for each day at a glance.

One day, Facebook just killed that endpoint for "privacy reasons". Anyone can still open a web browser and visit the event page, but accessing the data programmatically is now gone.

I guess they wanted to be the only event viewer, and since everyone only adds their events to Facebook and nowhere else, there is now no way to get event info.

When Facebook says "privacy" they mean "ad revenue".

You just need to look forward a few weeks to see a big one. The FaceBook and Instagram oEmbed changes that are going into effect at the end of October[1] are going to break all of the Facebook and Instagram embeds on WordPress sites (~1/3 of the internet) and the oEmbed functionality won't be available without a developer account[2].

[1] https://developers.facebook.com/docs/plugins/oembed-legacy

[2] https://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/50861

They way they feel when platforms change their policies without consultation is how I feel when I see targeted ads.

> Why should platform makers consult the advertising industry?

Any given platform succeeds or dies based on its applications.

In the case of mobile, many of those applications survive based on advertising.

It's the same way with software APIs... Creating new APIs is generally easy and doesn't need too much consultation compared to removing or changing APIs which would break behavior for all of your users. Apple created IDFA with the explicit intent of targeting ads and avoid using IMEI or MAC addresses. Now they are operating on it without consultation after having allowed a huge market to develop on it. Seems a pretty reasonable comment to make honestly.

For people blocking facebook -

https://web.archive.org/web/20200826162402/https://www.faceb...

https://archive.is/9q5Bc

> For people blocking facebook

I love that this is a category of people. (I'm one of them.)

This is the block list I use if anyone is interested: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/jmdugan/blocklists/master/...

Thanks, but is there not a way to use wildcards?

Not if you're just putting these entries in your hosts file

thanks. i'm not intentionally blocking facebook, but i couldn't read the article because it kept overlaying it with an error message.

I'd never thought to do that, thanks for sparking the idea.

>We believe that industry consultation is critical for changes to platform policies, as these updates have a far-reaching impact on the developer ecosystem. We’re encouraged by conversations and efforts already taking place in the industry - including within the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and the recently announced Partnership for Responsible Addressable Media (PRAM). We look forward to continuing to engage with these industry groups to get this right for people and small businesses.

Yes they would certainly prefer a "UN of ad-tech" that doesn't do anything rather than Apple's unilateral action.

> Partnership for Responsible Addressable Media

My guess is that this partnership is very similar to a hypothetical Foxes’ Partnership for Responsible Henhouse Interactions

It reminds me of Gavin Belson's "Tethics" from the Silicon Valley TV show.

Presumably they would also like veto power.

To be fair though, don't you remember how the DNT header worked really well for everybody involved, and how all these advertisers today universally respect it, and how they totally didn't abandon the entire concept as soon as it started seeing mainstream use and platforms started turning it on by default?

What could go wrong if we give them another spot at the table?

I mean, PRAM has already released so many good plans, like... a mission statement. But that counts! I mean, come on, it has 'Responsible' right in its name!

We've even had P3P spec that allowed users to say in browser's settings "I don't want your tracking cookies", without any consent pop-ups. It was even implemented in Internet Explorer!

And then Google found a loophole in the P3P syntax, and abused it to bypass it entirely. Fun times.

The problem with DNT was that it was off by default, advertisers didnt support it, and that it was yet another bit advertises used to create IDs for anon users.

The only real solution is to do away with third-party cookies being on by default. There are very narrow use cases that are beneficial to the end user, but the user-hostile ones far outweigh those.

DNT is based on a flawed assumption that ad tech has good faith. In the real world, though, you don't ask for privacy, you take it.

This is the real lesson from DNT: you can not trust bad actors to be good.

Every time we see these voluntary initiatives about how advertisers are going to be responsible from now on... they can't. The industry will never be responsible, left to their own devices they'll use DNT as a tracking mechanism, and then justify it by saying that they need to remain competitive.

There is no such thing as a responsible advertising industry, it doesn't exist. They've demonstrated over and over again that they have to be treated like malicious actors, they are incapable of self-regulating.

We respected it in our ad pixel server. DNTs didn't get tracked, just returned 200 blank, no logs generated. It didn't matter, though, in the end. Didn't get us positive/negative attention, users didn't really care, browsers stopped supporting it, and then it was just dead code.

Left the guard clause in, in the end, because of some misguided need to "do the right thing". It's just dead code. I'd just get rid of it now.

Despite online Internet attention, users don't care about this stuff so long as it's wicked fast (response times < 20 ms) and doesn't interfere with the thing they want. They want the thing it enables and they'll happily pay the price.

People online who talk about all this stuff visit whacky sites, get angry at being infected with god knows what from some shit Forbes.com or some crap or some porno site and then flip out at "Google for tracking me" or some crap.

Glad I'm not in that industry anymore. No one outside it knows what it does or enables.

Why is Facebook alarmed about users getting a choice if users are happy to be tracked?

Because forced decision making is a barrier to tool use. For instance, imagine if every time you opened your IDE it asked you which language you're going to type in. You like your IDE to be work best with the language you're working in, so that's good. You're adding user choice here, so that's good. But the outcome is bad. Why is that?

This isn't every time you open an app though, it's once, on install.

Imagine if the first time you opened your IDE it asked you what language you're going to type in. That would actually be very reasonable and helpful.

Well, if the discussion has shifted from "Why is Facebook alarmed about users getting a choice if users are happy to be tracked?" to "What frequency of being asked about a choice is acceptable?", I think all the tough parts of the argument are now complete and it's possible for the reader to walk through to the conclusion of why Facebook is alarmed.

I don't think the discussion has shifted. It's just that the objection you're raising, that too much choice is a barrier to tool usage, doesn't really apply to this situation.

Given that this isn't overloading the user with a ton of options each time they launch an app, why is Facebook alarmed about users having the choice to opt out of tracking?

And I'll extend on that question: even if users are annoyed at a single extra popup that gets shown once when they install an app, why does Facebook care? Users will still pick the option that they prefer, they'll just be annoyed at Apple for asking. Why is Facebook alarmed that users on iPhone will have to spend a half second, once, saying, "ugh, Apple, of course I want a company to track everything I do online"?

Writing behavior like that is probably the least-charitable interpretation of an instruction to ask the user what they want, and is certainly not within the spirit of that original request.

Ergo that tactic makes whoever uses it a malefactor

FB isn't really alarmed... The majority of their revenue comes from their own app which they'll continue to be able to target you on because people give data to it willingly. They won't be able to use their partner mobile apps to display ads to, that was a decent business but obviously will become less valuable, but it wasn't that big for them. They are signaling to their customers that things are changing and to expect that they'll change dramatically. FB however remains with your real email address on file and lots of accurate data about you, with their SDK and other mobile apps their accuracy in data collection won't change a whole lot.

> users don't care about this stuff

we do.

Right, should clarify that I mean "Users do not act in a manner that reveals they care about this". I.e. the majority of users won't use a product that's more compliant with the spec over one that does an extra thing they'd like.

Users don't have much choice in which ad streams they see. Publishers had the choice and seemed indifferent, but it feels weird to blame users for turning on a feature and not noticing a difference when that feature didn't work because most publishers failed to act on that feature / make it a requirement of their ad buys.

Yeah the DNT header didn't work due in large part to middle men (like routers or anti-virus tools) flipping that bit without asking the user in automatic, or again broad decisions, such as from Microsoft, of flipping the default of that header without asking users. Obviously if one side chooses to just do what they want, the other side is free to do what they want as well. This whole situation needs people to sit down and talk these issues through, like it's happening inside the W3C. It doesn't need a few companies to strong arm whatever is better for them financially (Apple makes no money off of current ads, but they'll force themselves in the picture with their attribution tool and will get more paid app revenue out of this, pretty clear incentive).

> Yeah the DNT header didn't work due in large part to middle men (like routers or anti-virus tools) flipping that bit without asking the user in automatic

A privacy option that's not allowed to be turned on by default based on user data and likely preferences isn't a real privacy option. Advertisers are the kings of trying to guess what users want, did they really think that browsers wouldn't be allowed to do the same with request headers?

This argument comes up a lot, and I'd debate it, but I also think behind the surface-level objections, the heart of the argument basically boils down to, "we didn't realize that people were going to use this thing."

The advertising industry was happy to have an opt-out as long as not too many people used it. Once it started getting turned on by default (because of course a user who's installing antivirus or privacy tools wants DNT to be enabled), Microsoft just became an excuse to abandon the whole thing.

If Microsoft had never turned DNT on by default, but the majority of users had sought out the option and turned it on, then advertisers would have come up with an excuse. Their participation with DNT was a compromise: "you can have a few of these users that probably run adblockers anyway, and in exchange, we want you to get off of our back about everything else."

For these people, respecting DNT always depended on it not being adopted. And that's why trusting them to talk about "responsible ads" or "consumer choice" is a waste of time. They know what they want the consumer choice on privacy to be, and they will only offer that choice as long as the average consumer chooses what they think the 'right' option is. If advertisers discover that the average consumer doesn't want to be tracked, then all of their talk about sitting down and having a dialog is going to go away.

DNT just became another fingerprinting datapoint, so it ended up being better to just set it to whatever the critical mass is using (which is typically off).

In iOS 13, Apple and third-party ad tracking were both controlled by the same opt-out setting. In iOS 14, the settings have been split, with third party tracking disabled and and Apple’s tracking enabled by default. Blatant anticompetitive behavior to promote their own tracking services in the guise of protecting users. Genius move by Apple.

https://twitter.com/eric_seufert/status/1291730115253145600?...

This is a pretty shitty move by Apple! Having said that, I can still disable Apple's tracking. I cannot easily do this with Google or Facebook. So while separating the first and third party preferences a shitty move, the changes to tracking protections in iOS 14 still do protect users.

You can 100% easily disable tracking with Google and Facebook. They both are required by GDPR and CCPA to provide the tools to do that. In both cases you can go in your account and disable targeted ads. Do it.

> disable tracking with Google and Facebook

> go in your account and disable targeted ads

Those are not the same thing.

GDPR and CCPA give you control to stop tracking altogether, not allowed to drop cookies to you. I fail to understand how that would be different.

Do not worry, the device identifier by Apple is rarely used anyways, usually ad networks identify the user either by fingerprinting or the app developer willingly giving away personal information like e-mail or login information.

Curious how you fingerprint an iOS device? I assume you can’t pull MAC, installed apps or anything that would be unique per phone owner.

I am actually not sure, but they do it somehow.

At least there is a way to opt-out compared to, say, things like this: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=carrieriq&sort=byPopularity&pr...

That looks like iOS 14- I don't see that separation in 13.6

Correct, there was a typo in my comment. I edited to add “14”.

To what extent is this really "tracking"? Apple's ads are served only in a few of their own apps, like the App Store and News. They're only tracking you across their own services, no differently than Facebook or Google could do in iOS 14, right?

This seems like a poor equivalence when Facebook and Google aren’t allowed to run an App Store on iOS, and Apple also boosts News, Music and other services by bundling and exempting them from the 30% revenue cut that competitors are subject to. Overall, the big picture is Apple is leveraging their power of platform owner to advantage their other businesses at the expense of competition and ultimately the consumer.

The big money at stake in this particular change is ads promoting the installation of apps. Facebook’s current tracking allows them to show that a particular ad FB displayed resulted in spending on an app. Apple taking over this business with their own ad service is just another aspect of their efforts to capture an ever-expanding chunk of commerce that occurs on every iOS device. Keep in mind the context that Apple is banning apps for allowing users to use subscription services without paying Apple 30% of the subscription revenue.

For what it’s worth, Google is guilty of some of the same issues on Android. I hope any regulation cracking down on these abuses will be equally applied.

I'm not sure it's a poor equivalence. Apple's ads appear only in a few of their own apps. I wouldn't even call it an ad service, because that implies that third-parties can use it.

In comparison, Google and Facebook both operate actual, for-profit ad services that are used across almost every website and app in the world.

I agree about Apple being too strict on the App Store. But it's not really what I'm talking about.

Apple does offer an ad service to third parties: https://searchads.apple.com

The biggest market for Facebook’s ads on iOS is for apps. Apple is cracking down on that with this change, so Facebook won’t be able to show attribution for app purchases. It’s hard not to think that this change is an effort to take over the market with their competing app advertising service.

My claim is that this is part of the larger effort to take a bigger cut the economic activity that happens on the phone. The 30% app cut expansion to cover more services is part of that. Capturing the advertising revenue for apps is another. The only way for Apple to keep growing as a two trillion dollar company is to take over more of the economy, and this is part of that effort.

I envision a future where, if they can get away with it, Apple takes an expanding cut of every Doordash delivery, every Uber ride, every Amazon purchase, and any other good or service that they can obtain sufficient market power to capture.

AaaS

In such doomsday scenario and assuming no laws gets passed to change things the service providers (eg. Instagram, Uber, Doordash) can start charging iOS users more to adjust for this. This is already happening as the YT subscription shows.

That is, goods on Amazon, Uber rides, food prices all will be more expensive to iOS users and then maybe Instagram and TikTok can start charging iOS users $50/yr as well. At the end of the day a mobile platform needs third party services as much they need the platform otherwise Windows phone would've survived.

This is my main issue with it. If Microsoft say, added something to your host file, that blocked all ad trackers except from the Microsoft network, everyone would be up in arms. But since it's Apple, people think this is out of the goodness of their heart when really they just want all the data for themselves which they will eventually use in their in-app advertising. Heck maybe they will use this to subsidize any losses they gave from eventually having to lower their 30% fee.

> If Microsoft say, added something to your host file, that blocked all ad trackers except from the Microsoft network, everyone would be up in arms.

You'll love this: https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/microsoft/windows-10-h...

Not seeing how this is similar? Telemetry data used to detect OS bugs vs highly intrusive data collection that is used for advertising?

Consider a scenario where a non-technical person whose friend blocked telemetry through the hosts file for them, and they get a pop-up saying that the hosts file is risky. It's stochastically likely that it's scary enough that they'll undo the privacy-preserving changes. In this case, Microsoft is using their weight to push users away from privacy.

From Peter Kafka:

>Yes. Apple has a detailed answer but essentially says that's not so, and is a misreading of its policy.

https://twitter.com/pkafka/status/1298662980457046016

I’d love to get more details about this.

Hmm, what is "their own tracking services"? iAd is dead since long, the only ads they serve are Apple Search Ads right? Is there any evidence/suggestion that they are using usage data from outside the App Store to target ASA? The promo-page doesn't seem to indicate that at least [1].

I mean, still in iOS 14, Google can use your data from e.g Google Maps / Chrome to target ads in the Youtube app on the same device without requiring any accounts by using identifierForVendor [0]. AFAIK this wouldn't require them to show the scary pop-up either, since they are only sharing the info with themselves?

But yeah, even without "tracking" the users, the ASA is of course in a privileged position, both in its prominent position in the (only) App Store, and by the possibility to charge per e.g app install. Doing reliable app install tracking without IDFA is next to impossible. Taking it further by restarting iAd now would be highly problematic imho.

[0]: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/uikit/uidevice/162... [1]: https://searchads.apple.com/privacy/

Facebook’s top ad business on iOS is for app installs. Their cross-app tracking is how they demonstrate that the ad resulted in app sales. Apple is cutting that off here. As you mention, Apple’s competing ad service is also for app installs.

Apple will actually hurt themselves with this change. The apps that can afford to advertise have a paid component to generate revenues. Apple taxes this revenue at 30%. I don’t get why they are going after FB when they aren’t a threat and Social media is the reason to people upgrade your phone to get a better camera. Not to mention the revenue FB drives in App Store purchases.

That’s a solid point. I’d look out for Apple to push their app install ads into more places (eg. the home search bar, various apps they bundle with the phone). Maybe a second attempt at iAd - it will be easier for that to succeed with the competition blocked.

From my naive perspective, it looks like they’re taking their privacy stance so seriously that they’re willing to lose some revenue.

Not just Apple search, they have ads for product installs in Apple News (see sample in imgur link below) and will presumably add similar add space inventory to other services as times progresses. So if they have one set of rules for them and one for third-parties, that can be interpreted as likely anti-competitive behavior

https://imgur.com/hOkRKBP

iOS 14 has a prompt for third party tracking.[1] It isn't disabled.

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2020/06/22/apple-ios-14-ad-tracking/

The wording here is subtly different from the text they reportedly emailed out - https://twitter.com/rjonesy/status/1298662658934222848

Notably, it omits the line saying they won't use the prompt in their own apps (which they'd be required to do whether or not they used IDFA) and omits the advice that implies their customers should figure out other ways to gather identifying information

The response to that is to just not allow them to update their app until they comply.

Not sure why you got downvoted for this. I expect that this will be Apple’s response 100%. They would come off so good putting up a fight for users.

Probably because Apple's total control of the platform is why this change could happen. Their ability to not allow a developer to distribute an app update that doesn't comply with the new privacy change stems from the same power that allows them to collect 30/15% of in-app purchases.

> Use non-IDFA match methods such as adopting Facebook Login or using Advanced Matching to share hashed customer contact information

nice

Gosh, there goes Apple with their anti-competitive monopolistic behaviour again. Facebook better join Epic in the queue at the courtroom.

(sarcasm, in case it wasn't obvious)

I wonder if FB tried to negotiate and Apple's response was "For a small fee, merely 30% of your company's ad revenue, we can remove the permission requirement.."

Apple absolutely does abuse their power as a monopoly. I'm not sure how that's related to asking users for permission to share data with third parties, which is what this was about.

Apple is exempting itself from this policy, keeping its own tracking on by default: https://twitter.com/eric_seufert/status/1291730115253145600?...

Previously, Apple and third-party tracking were both controlled by the same opt-put setting. Using your power as platform owner to turn your competitor’s ad tracking off by default while keeping yours on? Sure seems abusive to me.

Completely agree. I was not aware they were doing this too.

iOS 14 has a prompt for third party tracking.[1] It isn't off by default.

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2020/06/22/apple-ios-14-ad-tracking/

In what way is Apple a competitor to Facebook or Google Ads?

Facebook’s top ad business on iOS is promoting other apps. The tracking being blocked by this change is how they attribute app sales to the Facebook ad. Apple has a competing service: https://searchads.apple.com/

I think the purpose of this change is to redirect the revenue from FB to Apple.

That is, for Apple, perhaps a nice side effect of the change. But I don't see it replacing Facebook app ads ... I never "see" the Apple ads.

The real purpose of this change is to continue to drive home to Apple users, who are increasing aware of privacy issues, that Apple has their back. Anything else is gravy.

My opinion: follow the money. Apple’s publicly stated growth strategy is to expand services revenue. Taking this ad market from Facebook is part of that strategy. The PR is gravy. Apple isn’t the EFF.

Monopoly of what? A platform of their own creation?

It's not of the app market or the mobile phone market, there are strong viable competitors in both.

No one says Toyota is a monopolist of Toyota cars and yet Apple is called a monopolist of the App Store, iOS, and Apple phones.

Strangely, nobody says Microsoft has an xBox monopoly either. Likewise, no complaints about the PS4/5 monopoly or Nintendo Monopoly.

Oh I would love to be able to buy a full-price PS5 to install whatever I want on, rather than the discounted-because-PS-store one we have now.

Likewise, I'd be willing to pay a reasonable premium for a truly unlocked iPhone.

The difference is the iPhone isn't sold below cost, you should already be able to unlock it (except Apple just doesn't want you to) .

This makes no sense. As a consumer, I'm dropping $500 on a console. How much it costs Microsoft to make doesn't affect my relationship with them or my relationship with developers of the platform.

It does when they don't want you to be able to unlock it because they'll lose money on it.

It's called a PC.

And the fact that people still flock to consoles means that users want a safe, curated, vibrant, affordable gaming platform. Which would be destroyed if you (a) stopped Sony making a profit of games and forcing them to make it from the hardware and (b) stopped Sony from blocking crapware, malware and counterfeits.

Why even make these straw men? What's the use?

1) Who said that games need to be sold at cost?

2) Who said anything about stopping Sony doing anything?

Does the fact that you can unlock Android phones mean that the manufacturers (or Google) have now gone out of business? Or that they can't curate their stores?

Just a super low effort reply.

Consoles are unique in that they sell the hardware initially at a loss which they recoup through game sales and future production efficiencies. If you allow people to install third party software without Sony's approval then you deprive them of this revenue stream and make the platform basically like a PC. Which us console gamers do not want.

Android manufacturers make their money from the hardware so it's irrelevant to them which apps you install.

Yes, Sony won't make profit on games unless you actually want games. I don't see what the problem is. Sell a more expensive, unlocked version of the PS5 I can do whatever I want on.

What's the issue?

[deleted]

Play PS4 games.

Genuine question: what is the difference between a last gen video game console and a PC with artificial locks that allows the user to run only what the manufacturer wants?

What?

Facebook is playing in Apple’s garden here. Remember when Facebook made their own phone and app store, and nobody wanted it?

> Ultimately, despite our best efforts, Apple’s updates may render Audience Network so ineffective on iOS 14 that it may not make sense to offer it on iOS 14.

Translation: The iOS changes are making the platform more like a printed newspaper. So please continue to spend your ad budget with Facebook because we have X monthly active users and we’re the top in social media.

> We expect less impact to our own advertising business, and we’re committed to supporting advertisers and publishers through these updates.

Translation: We will do everything in our power to track users and collect more information from our already invasive apps. While we’re happy to keep making money here, please continue to advertise with us on our platforms because we have X monthly active users and we’re the top in social media. Innovation is at the heart of what we do. Did you see our TikTok clone in Instagram lately?

I’m all for how these changes are going to negatively affect Facebook and advertisers. But I just can’t also escape the feeling in the long term I’m giving up control of the devices I own and the actual act of computing to get to this result.

If it came to destroying advertisers or free open computing I want free computing.

This is just an operating system vendor designing its own APIs.

Then don't buy an iPhone.

There are hundreds of phone manufacturers who are more than happy to take your money.

But if you buy an iPhone you need to understand that you are in the minority i.e. that most of us want Apple to make changes like this.

> There are hundreds of phone manufacturers

That all ship one OS.

Not really. Android differs pretty heavily from one manufacturer to another.

And there are pure Linux phones as well.

I'm confused. What about this decision is causing you to give up control of your device? You can just opt into the tracking; which you want to do for some reason.

I'm all for bashing Apple for some of their more restrictive policies but what about THIS decision is making you uncomfortable?

It's an iPhone; you already gave up control. This is just Apple using their control against trackers.

> I’m giving up control of the devices I own

You never had control of ios devices to begin with, the iphone always has been everything but "free computing"

This kind of thing is why I was happy to pay a premium for my iPhone.

> Ultimately, despite our best efforts, Apple’s updates may render Audience Network so ineffective on iOS 14 that it may not make sense to offer it on iOS 14.

Seems like Apple is really backing up their rhetoric with real action. Awesome news for anyone that values privacy. Kudos to Apple.

This is what gets me to move away from Android. I like the Andoird ecosystem more, but my hate for advertising supercedes all of that.

That's ironic given some of the best possible ad blocking on mobile devices is Ublock Origin on Firefox mobile which is only available on Android (Apple only allows third party browsers to wrap Safari on iOS). Its 2020 and the only modicum of privacy you can get is a rooted android device.

Yeah but that only blocks browser based ads - what Apple is doing here is blocking trackers at the OS level - this is what FB is complaining about since their SDK allows the device to be tracked - not just browsers.

Does Android SDK let the device to be tracked?

TrackerControl is also a great app (available on F-Droid[1]; probably also on the Play Store but I wouldn't know) that works without root. It blocks a blacklist of known tracker domains and you can turn them on/off per-app.

For example, does your HackerNews app need to talk to Google? Probably not, so that gets blocked by default. Does your Newpipe/YouTube app? Yes, so you should unblock that from talking to Google. The Spotify app also tries to talk to like 9 different tracking domains, but only one category is actually required to fully use the app. Screenshot: https://dro.pm/n.png (Current version doesn't yet allow toggling per-domain in an attempt to make it easier/more manageable; but iirc allowing that is a planned change.)

The app is under active development and the dev seems to listen to feature requests, so if you have any... :). One downside is that it doesn't work alongside other VPN apps because it pretends to be a VPN. If anyone has a good idea how to solve that, the dev asked for ideas if I remember correctly.

I already blacklisted advertising domains in /etc/hosts and disabled things like broadcast listeners so certain apps don't receive the OnBoot/OnAppInstalled/etc. events to limit what they notice and can do, but with TC I feel like my privacy on Android got a substantial boost. Spotify was the last app I use with Facebook integration and I was wondering what to do about it, but I think that is not an issue anymore now.

[1] https://f-droid.org/en/packages/net.kollnig.missioncontrol.f...

Blokada is a similar local-vpn adblocker available on F-droid. It uses the same block lists as browser adblockers, so much less configuration is required.

I don't currently use an iPhone (contemplating jumping ship as well), but my understanding is you can get similar functionality on there using AdGuard.

> Its 2020 and the only modicum of privacy you can get is a rooted android device.

There is also Pinephone with pure GNU/Linux and killswitches.

That is a good point. I switched from Chrome to Firefox for ublock, and I use Firefox Focus regularly. That will be sad to lose moving to iOS.

Just FYI Firefox Focus is also on iOS. (And it also acts as a third-party content blocker for Mobile Safari, though it’s no uBlock Origin.)

Firefox Focus is on iOS; I use it as an ad-blocker in Safari, and to view the occasional Instagram or FB page. It does a pretty good job of blocking ads, even though it's restricted to using WebKit.

iOS has many ad blockers which work as well as Ublock. 1Blocker for example. On top of it these blockers don’t need to read contents of the site to block ads.

uBlock Origin can filter HTML elements. That includes script tags. It can replace scripts when blocking them breaks pages. Safari content blockers can't work as well.

It's really not a big deal.

Only if they made this accessible to everyone. You need a thousand dollar phone which is useless in 3 years

https://www.apple.com/iphone-se/

Apple has 5 years support for their iPhones, which is way longer than the 18months from other manufacturers.

Good sarcasm!

Sometimes it’s hard to communicate tone through text alone, but I really think you managed it there. Looking forward to more of your witty comments.

Yes, it's a tragedy that the iPhone SE and 6S became unsupported after squints 6 years and counting.

I have a three year old iPhone X that works just fine. My Mom is still using my 5 year old iPhone that I gave her when I bought my new one ...

Facebook are not in control of this, so their consultations and conversations will all be for naught.

Thank god.

We remain committed to helping the thousands of developers and publishers that rely on ads from Audience Network, and we’re investing time and resources into building monetization products for publishers as well as supporting other platforms outside of iOS 14.

https://www.facebook.com/audiencenetwork/news-and-insights/p...

Translation: Facebook will find a way.

What changes are being made in iOS 14 that are so impactful to FB's business?

https://www.macrumors.com/guide/ios-14-privacy/

Facebook is getting scared of the prompt (shown by Apple) saying FB will track you, and whether you would like to opt-out. More importantly, they are putting the opt-opt right below the opt-in (yayyy!)

Almost every app will have to ask this kinda prompt now. Not just FB.

Good move by Apple

Yep. Great segment from Jobs that seems to hold true today: https://youtu.be/39iKLwlUqBo

Given the attitude on HN about iOS14, I don’t think most here grasp the implication of gutting ad attribution. All publishers (news sites, indie games, etc) are going to see huge drops in CPM. It could easily be a business ending shift.

Sure removing IDFA will help protect user privacy, but let’s not kid ourselves that there will not be collateral damage. Being a third party publisher will be that much harder and walled gardens (FB, Google, Instagram) will be further cemented as the only viable business model.

If that was really the case then why are FB and Google fighting it so hard? Shouldn’t they want this then?

I believe it will still comprise a reduction in their revenue. The internet as a whole will be less profitable, and only the big players will be able to survive.

Maybe with time there can be a shift in the economics, but I would not bet on it. I can’t imagine people will start paying for email, search, music streaming...

Or we'll shift back to an internet where people make things because they enjoy making them, not because they're trying to get a million clicks on blog spam. I'd be happy if the internet as a whole was a less profitable place.

Don’t assume I’m against that from the perspective of a netizen. I too grew up reading slashdot and idolizing the FSF. I’m just pointing out this well could be the death knell of SWE as we know it.

I will definitely miss the ridiculous TC fueled by the ad-laden web, but at least maybe I won’t work alongside physics and math phds on optimizing clicks....

Don’t people already pay for music streaming?

> I can’t imagine people will start paying for email, search, music streaming...

There's absolutely now reason why these services can't all fit in a 5-10$/month allowance. E-mail is already ~2$/month with Office 365, and if everyone starts paying economies of scale would make even cheaper plans profitable.

Some of these services can just as well be provided by the ISP, like e-mail was back in the days. A lot of ISPs are indeed scum but there isn't technically anything forcing the users to use them (you can pay for a third-party) and I think the move away from e-mail being centralized around a few giants like Google (GMail), Microsoft (Outlook), etc would be a good thing.

FB’s ARPU in US in 2019 was $112. Google’s was $256.

By comparison, paid services would cost $30/month. You might be willing to pay that, but many will not. People already share Netflix accounts or bootleg their friend’s HBO accounts.

I think a shift to paid services is _possible_ but I won’t bet on it. The economics and market forces that brought us metered data and text usage haven’t really changed. Destroying the advertising-supported offerings will not spawn competition overnight. But in any case I think the big players are positioned to weather the changes.

And by the way, $30/month/user is an average. If you are have high disposable income you are likely netting FB et al more than that.

How much of that ARPU is covering overheads of the advertising model (all the infrastructure and middlemen) as opposed to being actual money spent by brands on customer acquisition? If ads didn't exist and people wanted to pay for stuff, wouldn't brands be able to offer lower prices because of easier customer acquisition (not having to pay for ads) and thus people wouldn't need to share accounts if the account costs a couple of bucks a month?

The claim regulating the big players will actually hurt the little guys is the common cry of the big player hoping they don't actually end up getting regulated. As your comment points out, it really doesn't hold up to a cursory examination of what's being claimed and how they stand to gain. ;)

Apple added SKAdnetwork specifically for the attribution use case, presumably because they foresaw this.

SKAdNetwork is severely restrictive. In my group we’re still forecasting a major hit to our ability to perform attribution or lift analysis.

It's worth it in the balance of user privacy and how accurate attributions are imo. Apple are tilting the balance back in favour of users.

Why can't attribution be solved by including a campaign ID in the links to the product the ad is selling, and then counting the number of purchases per campaign ID?

Is it because it's a manufactured problem by this scummy industry where they try to consider anything a "conversion" like "we showed this guy an ad 2 years ago and now he finally happened to look the right way at our client's shop while walking past it, this is definitely because of our ad and we should include this in our conversion stats"?

There's a limit to how many campaigns you can be a part of as well since one could display an arbitrary set of campaigns to you and understand who they targeted once again. In any case "show this guy an ad" like you quote, won't leave signs or campaign IDs in the apple framework unless there's a way to track that user explicitly. And tagging people that viewed ads is not anywhere in the scheme for apple. As an aside, attribution of online ads is vastly more sophisticated than you paint it and it involve statistical and causal models. https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/2020408.2020453 https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/eaa4/875ae2376d681e156dcc3b... https://research.netflix.com/business-area/marketing-and-gro...

> Being a third party publisher

And what is it that you publish that helps humanity?

> I don’t think most here grasp the implication of gutting ad attribution.

> All publishers (news sites, indie games, etc) are going to see huge drops in CPM. It could easily be a business ending shift.

Your second statement might not imply the first. It could be that publishers are going to see business disrupting shifts in CPM, and we are aware of that fact, and still support the changes.

"Why is everyone praising this? Don't they realize that it will make it harder to track them?"

At the same time, there's something really telling that after all of the years of the advertising industry talking about how users actually want to be tracked and targeted, they are nonetheless terrified of something as simple as a prominent opt-out button.

If advertisers sincerely believed that users wanted what they were offering, then they wouldn't view it as an existential threat for users to have the ability to turn the offer down. If the take is, "users having control over their own data will be devastating for the advertisers", then honestly that's kind of a big signal that the advertising industry is out of control and needs some business disrupting shifts.

> At the same time, there's something really telling that after all of the years of the advertising industry talking about how users actually want to be tracked and targeted, they are nonetheless terrified of something as simple as a prominent opt-out button.

I actually gave it a chance. The problem was during that time the ads (from Google) were more irrelevant.

Back in the old days you could often see how ads were relevant to the topic of the web site you were visiting or the topic you searched for even if they weren't always relevant to me (e.g. selling expensive software while I was a broke student, living outside the US).

The next years - sometimes after the Double Click acquisition it seems - I started seeing almost only irrelevant ads everywhere.

I don't have anything against companies making money - in fact I liked it when Google were earning good money before Double Click. But when they add invasive tracking and the quality goes way down at the same time something has gone wrong.

Then you don’t have to deny tracking. But for the rest of us who want to deny tracking I like this, collateral damage or not.

I do resist tracking now and also changed to iOS last year.

It was a younger version of me that gave them a chance.

They failed hard.

I get the implications. It's not that I'm indifferent to them, it's that I'm actively happy about them.

I hope every company that makes a living by trying to spy on me goes out of business.

If this was twitter, this would be where I reply with the gif of Donald Glover saying "good".

Business models come and go. This one isn't as bad as slavery or child labour, but but I'd happily tap-dance on its grave.

Today it struck me that at the moment I think I like Facebooks behavior better than Googles.

Mind you; I don't think Facebook is less evil, just that they seem to have understood better than Google that users need to be treated with some amount of respect, at least for now.

At this point you have to assume a round of antitrust lawsuits once the US govt returns to normal. But you have to wonder how they will divide the big tech or whether DC will even have the expertise required to implement something credible and effective.

What, exactly, would be this grounds for an anti-trust lawsuit for this change?

I mean, I can see a viable anti-trust action for the Hey.com/Epic fiascoes and the ongoing 30% app revenue fees...

The WhatsApp acquisition didn't exactly improve the messaging landscape either.

On the browser side one company has really been using their market position in a different market (ads) to outcompete at least two commercial browser engines while the independent open source one has been reduced to fraction of what it once was.

> We look forward to continuing to engage with these industry groups to get this right for people and small businesses.

right for people? by people they mean shareholders and zuckerberg not users

The online ads business is collapsing. I predicted that some years ago and now the first signs become visible. First data collecting will be come harder and harder because people simply don't want that anymore. Then if targeted ads are no longer possible we have a level playing field again where everyone can deliver ads not just the big players. And finally if ads do no longer pay for everything on the net we will finally put a piece tag on commercial stuff.

Did you predict other stuff too?

To be honest, as an internet user, nothing of value will be lost. Wikipedia will survive, my favorite torrent tracker will persist, and so on. But as a SWE who has grown fat on the advertising largesse, I will suffer. And so will most of you.

I think the online ad business is collapsing (collapsing might be a strong word, but there's definitely a bubble bursting and the market needing a big readjustment) not because of technical problems but simply because people have a certain amount of time and attention and anything beyond that is a waste of money. The advertising industry unfortunately did not understand that and most people are saturated with ads (crappy, low-quality ones for the most part too) and learned to tune them out or outright block them. This may not have happened if the ad quantity remained reasonable.

Understand that the ad industry isn't a monolith. The advertisers shoveling shit ads onto local news websites aren't making some grand bargain for short term revenue at the expense of long term consequences (blocking, etc.). Those advertisers simply wouldn't exist otherwise. They're filling a small niche while they can. The fact that their behavior might cause the whole industry problems over the long term does not matter to them.

Google, FB, et al would love it if these shitware ads disappeared because fewer people would feel the need to block ads. But there's really nothing they can do about it without being shouted down (or worse) as being anticompetitive, regardless of whether that's true or not in this case (and there probably is some truth to it).

> But there's really nothing they can do about it without being shouted down (or worse) as being anticompetitive

Why would enforcing a standard of quality (to keep user's trust by not showing them shit ads) be considered anti-competitive? Google already bans entire industries from advertising and are fine with that, why would enforcing a level of quality (and raising prices to offset the cost of human review) be anticompetitive?

Truth is that neither Google nor Facebook care as long as they get paid.

Cannot wait for iOS 14. Apple is the only big company taking privacy seriously, well done.

How is that so many anti-Apple comments in this thread? Are we already in a stage when giant Ad Corps are intentionally distorting public discussions?

As a user, when developers and other companies complain about Apple’s overreach, it just tells me to avoid those developers and companies.

As to your last question: Of course, why wouldn’t they?

It’s interesting that Apple is taking steps that are tough on Ad networks and tracking. From Apples perspective, why are they waging this war? Sure, user experience in the Apple ecosystem is improved, but there has to be more to the story.

At first, I thought it was a long-game strategy of chipping away at Google + Facebook while developing a walled-off user base that only Apple (and their affiliates/partners) can monetize. But there has to be something more substantial.

Assuming it costs $X to develop these adtech walls, Apple must require $Y in return... where is this $Y going to come from?

Apple has usually billed itself as a high quality hardware manufacturer, and more recently they've expanded into services. The lion's share of their revenue is from these two things.

Privacy has always been a core tenet of Apple's value proposition. They ask for more money, and in return you get assurance that the system you're using values your privacy more than other ecosystems.

I don't necessarily think there needs to be anything more to it than that. Apple knows it can win privacy conscious people and monetize them in ways Google can't, and that's what it does.

It's simple; Apple is aggressively expanding into service business space where many of it doesn't really make sense to make direct revenue while they're largely a underdog. Given that developing those services on par to FB/Google/Amazon's needs at least tens of billions of dollars, they cannot really build a sustainable business without generating actual revenue. And no one has developed a business model applicable to billion user bases for those "free" services other than advertising.

Of course, while it's possible that Apple can keep themselves away from those "free" services but it means that they also need to give up a part of their control on customer relationship. Since it is the core part of their long term strategy, I don't think they can easily give it up. I think they will eventually foray into the advertising business rather than giving up user control.

Here, the only major advantage of their services is platform control. The major disadvantage is their perception of privacy-friendly company, so their options on ad network level optimization are significantly limited. The only relevant ads service from Apple is app search ads because this is the only area they can get user information without privacy troubles; this clearly demonstrates their strong and weak points.

The only logical conclusion that can be derived from this situation is utilizing their platform control to "level the playground"; even if Apple cannot use the same user data, they can force others to give up. This will neutralize Apple's disadvantage while retaining their platform advantages, which likely give them some time to catch up their competitors in service businesses as well.

What amuses me is that all Apple is doing here is putting up a dialog asking if the user wants to be tracked. And Facebook knows just how much users hate being tracked, so they are avoiding the API that results in the dialog.

Yet their rhetoric is "tracking is great and people love it! they're going to be so sad once tracking is gone!"

> Yet their rhetoric is "tracking is great and people love it! they're going to be so sad once tracking is gone!"

I would not characterize Facebook's post that way. Facebook's post doesn't mention the impact on/reaction from the end users at all.

My interpretation of all this is that no reasonable user would consent to the tracking anyway and the marginal benefit of users who do consent is outweighed by users who are creeped out and decline the tracking.

So much drama. Ugh. But, I won't be shedding any tears for Facebook.

What a squirmy and deflective piece of writing.

The more I see ad tech complaining about iOS the safer I feel using it.

They never responded to me asking that they document privacy preparation guidance for their SDK in iOS 14: https://github.com/facebook/facebook-ios-sdk/issues/1450.

Can they follow the Epic route and sue?

Sue Apple for putting privacy first and informing users of clear opt-out choice right below the opt-in?

Yes. Apple is using their monopoly position to harm their business of selling private data of consumers.

They are not competitors. Antitrust law might not apply.

Apple has an ad platform.

Yes, how is forcing developers to use Apple telemetry/ads/whatever any different than forcing them to use Apple Pay for in-app purchases? What else can they grasp?

They're also harming my SaaS (Stalking as a Service) offering. Call my lawyers!

You need to make it clear if you are being sarcastic or not here.

It's a legitimate basis for a lawsuit, since spying on users isn't illegal and you can theoretically prove Apple's changes will cause real harm. But everyone involved is kind of scummy, so I'm gonna let the billionaires fight on this one.

Anybody can sue for any reason.

I can't think of any basis on which they wouldn't be quickly dismissed, though.

"Preparing our partners"? More like notifying them that their businesses may go out of business.

It reads to me like "Wah, we can't do what we want anymore. Boohoo! However, we are working hard to find a way to get around the upcoming limitations."

it will impact small apps that are whose business is dependent on buying or selling mobile ad space more than facebook itself

I have no sympathy for a company who is so dependent on the invasive use of personal data to survive.

fuck facebook and fuck their implications ... I really, really hope this is finally actually a change that puts a dent into ad monetization.

Aww the gangsters are fighting. Maybe they should call a truce and focus on making everyone happy before they are busted the hell up by the most powerful government on Earth.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-08-26/house-ant...

The abuser playbook really is pretty standard. I'm kind of surprised we don't have classes on how to avoid being on the receiving end.

Push the person until they crack, then call for discretion and dialog about the 'problem' so you don't get what's coming to you.

But that would probably conflict tremendously with the corporate interests that inform our public education system.

You kind of took it off the deep at there with the last sentence. Sure the Trump dept of education has been especially bad, but you can't blame all of the past decades of US public education mediocrity on corporate interests. Don't attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence.

You might want to do a deep dive on the politics of textbooks, standardized tests, and the economics of charter schools. Corporate interests run deep, and it isn't limited to trump or either party.

I wouldn't call examining the controversy over school text books as a "deep dive" into anything. As far as education topics go, it's as shallow as a google search.

I've been to a few thousand school board meetings in my day. There are a lot of unmined topics there.

You're right, a deep dive does involve more than a single google search. Read multiple stories, dig up references, find what google's filter bubble isn't showing you, figure out what people on "both" (but usually several) sides are saying; maybe hunt down some podcasts if you're into that.

And, y'know, reading past the first comma in somebody's comment to notice that multiple topics were listed. I'd love to hear what you consider to be unmined topics.

Don't attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence.

Or unions.

While teachers unions have been great for teachers, they've been lousy for teaching.

I disagree, unions give teachers power in a system that constantly takes their labor for granted

In other words unions are... great for teachers?

You're conspicuously silent here on the "lousy for teaching" clause.

I'm a better employee when I'm not scrambling to make ends meet. I'd imagine the same is true for teachers.

In every place I've lived, teachers bargain hard for their students. Yes, they bargain for their own pathetic wages and benefits, but they're also bargaining for classroom resources, smaller classrooms, better education for kids with additional needs, etc. And DAMN the short-sighted politicians who play with kids' futures and use those asks as bargaining chips. Childhood education is one of the highest ROI investments we can make as a society, but apparently we'd rather spend money on cops and emergency rooms.

Teachers unions are only great for bad teachers; for good teachers they are at best grossly inadequate (see klyrs's response), and often outright harmful (for much the same reasons they're harmful to teaching).

As European it is hard to grasp the US hate on unions.

I love our European unions, which support anyone across the company, including software developers.

Want to make a slave out of me? Talk to the hand.

Plenty of hate for unions here in Canada too. Some how, in North America, we've convinced a large percentage of people who should belong to unions that unions will destroy society.

Which is quite sad, given how relevant both countries were in giving birth to them during the early days of industrial revolution.

As an American, I think it is just decades of seeing the problems caused by unions. In the worst case look at our police unions, it is now pretty well accepted that they are a large part of the problem with police brutality and killings here. It's now a growing mainstream belief that they should be disbanded, and after seeing time and time again how they protect murderers and abusers it's hard not to agree.

In other industries the stakes are not life and death in the same way, but it seems like the same principles hold. If a small percentage of employees in an industry are corrupt or negligent, and the unions defend them and prevent them from ever being fired or facing any negative consequences, they can do a lot of damage.

Also, in the US a lot of benefits that unions provide for their members go against the interests of broader society. Unions are some of the biggest opponents of nationalized healthcare, for example.

As far as the upsides, I think unions were more useful when governments were much smaller and weaker than they are today. In that world, the upsides outweighed the downsides because people had no other protections. With how incredibly wealthy the US is now, a functioning government should be able to provide the benefits for every citizen that unions provide for their members, while avoiding the downsides of the fierce "us vs them" dynamic that unions can create which has ended up dividing society in many instances.

(Obviously there's a big asterisk there on "functioning" government, but many unions don't seem to be functioning very well either as I mentioned earlier, so it's a tie on that front. If we can't get our large bodies to function better than they are these days, we're screwed no matter what).

Why did you assume a general statement about the public education system was an attack against the current Administration instead of a complaint about decades of neglect? Education is mostly a state/local matter.

Also, Devos is publicly in favour of eliminating public schools in favour of private schools / voucher systems and has attempted to drastically reduce her own portfolios budget; so the malice is openly on display here.

The education system literally exists to serve corporate America.

Pretty sure the education system exists to serve the education system. Big Ed is an industry unto itself, you don't need the nefarious corporate America behind it to make it a money-extracting cabal. $120k in student loans and a liberal arts degree in French Literature from a big-name college? The college bears no risk if the consumer of their product cannot pay on the loan. Hard to see how that serves corporate America.

I was thinking primarily of the public education system (through high school). I think you are right that the university system is more sel-serving. However, even there I think it is mostly a servant of the neoliberal economic machine. The insane loans indenture the professional class to the banking class.

I've heard it said that the best way to answer the abusive party is with "that's your problem"

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24284891.

TL;DR: Apple's move will help the big guys & hurt the smaller ones.

> We believe that industry consultation is critical for changes to platform policies

User consultation is more critical, but Facebook doesn't really have "users", per se - they have products.

Oh, they have plenty of users; they're just not the people whose labour they're harvesting.

Good point

What we really need is an open platform on iOS for app stores, so that Facebook can launch or partner with a third party store that provides built in APIs to enable bypassing Apples restrictions. Maybe Facebook could make their app exclusive to it, so hundreds of millions of users are drawn to an App Store sub-platform subsidised by intrusive, data scraping, privacy compromising policies. Win!

Why are you assuming that app stores get to provide access to private data? I would expect that apps from any app store are just as sandboxed as the ones from Apple's.

They need to be able to communicate with the store, which needs to be able to provide services such as iAP, background update, reviews and recommendations and whatever else the store provider wants to offer. This is how Google Play store works right now on Android, so this is not theoretical, and you'd bet Google would want a store on iOS and they'd want it to provide the same services Play Store provides on Android.

Apple Store apps might well be sandboxed from third party store apps, but there are no guarantees apps within a store ecosystem would provide the same privacy, that would be up to the store provider and Apple would have no say in it.

If a third party could provide an equivalent to Apple's tracking ID, they'd already be able to do that with a library. Having a different app store has absolutely no effect on this issue whatsoever.

It does because Apps have to be able to communicate with their store, and that could enable bridging between apps which breaks the sandbox. It's all up to the store provider, see more detailed reply in parallel comment.

Apple pushed an OSX update (10.15.6) just to demand acceptance to their data-sharing practices from all their user.

The forced-to-accept "welcome" screen (which shows up before the main desktop and disregard every single accessibility option the user might have (even the mouse scrolling direction!) starts with:

> "Apple's ad platform is designed to protect your information ..."

A few interesting things. First, I doubt any Advertising platform was or will ever be designed "to protect you information". They are designed to generate revenue by ensuring people see Adverts.

Second, I think it is the first time the words "Apple's [Advertising] Platform" was ever shown to Apple's end users.

Lastly, what's up with using "ad" on a somewhat legal document you are forcing me to accept? It is not a word.

When did this happen? Accessibility options have always been available for me in Setup Assistant (which usually does the post-login after update setup).

i mention the version on the now-downvoted-to-oblivion post

Ad is a word. Get over it.

"A sound or a combination of sounds, or its representation in writing or printing, that symbolizes and communicates a meaning"

'Ad' sure seems like a word to me :)

I actually think there are more people that would prefer contracts, terms and conditions, and legal documents be written more in plain English, not less. Things that reduce friction of being able to take in that information without reducing clarity seem to me like a net positive.

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