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Comment by byefruit | Hacker News Reader

This isn't necessarily a principled campaign from Apple.

Apple no longer has an ad network which means it can't take it's cut from ad revenue. By reducing the effectiveness of ads on the platform it pushes more people to in app purchases which it receives a heft chunk of.

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I don’t get this argument.

If you have to rely on companies’ good conscience long term you will be lost and abandoned. As such individual acts of ethical behavior are maybe nice but not really very important or meaningful.

It’s much better if companies are structured in such a way that their own self-interest aligns closely with the self-interest of society at large.

Such a match will never be perfect, but if it works it’s quite nice.

I would argue that Apple is at least in some ways structured so that its own self-interest regarding privacy results in positive privacy conscious outcomes for everyone.

It’s of course good to know that generally speaking companies will always act in self-interest but if self-interest leads to positive outcomes then that’s much more stable and longer-lasting than some CEO acting out of the goodness of their heart. That’s fickle and can just disappear any second.

To say, what you're saying, but with fewer words; with Apple you pay for your privacy with money, rather than paying with your privacy instead of money.

At least for now, until they decide that they can get your money and also further monetize the private info that only they have, which will command a premium. Hopefully that doesn't happen, but who knows.

Indeed. Unfortunately none of us can predict the future. For now, the best we can do is make an informed decision based on what is presently the case. One day hopefully, steps will enter the mainstream to prevent the need for trust by guaranteeing our information isn't collected and thus can't be sold.

Which private info do they have?

That’s one way to look at it.

Apple has two sets of customers. They architected the worlds greatest casino through the AppStore, and the developers who make the machines are just as morally pure as Facebooks customers.

Look at the Epic controversy, which boils down to who should get the biggest cut of real money from selling bullshit virtual funny money.

> I would argue that Apple is at least in some ways structured so that its own self-interest regarding privacy results in positive privacy conscious outcomes for everyone.

Is it though? I thought they still had an ad network so I searched a bit to find it and how it was itself impacted by this button to find this:

https://support.apple.com/en-ca/HT202074

So they only got ads on their store, perfectly fine, and it seems to be impacted as the button does say All advertisers. It even seems to show what information they use on the store, seriously that's well beyond what I was expecting A+.

And then I saw "Turn off location-based ads". Weird the first screenshot didn't have that checkbox... It's hidden in System Service, who really go there to set Advertising setting? Even more so while you got the perfect place already on the perfectly logical "Settings > Privacy > Advertising".

Their self-interest regarding privacy aren't aligned at all with yours. They are just trying to make the most buck out of you and they found one more profitable than ads. For location based ads, it seems like they still believe it will bring them more cash.

That means that the day ads will be back as the most profitable way for them, you'll be back to square one ;) with just much less competition. Good luck!

I think you do get this argument and we're actually saying pretty much the same thing.

I'm saying people shouldn't look at this decision as "Apple has our interests in mind" but rather "in this particular case Apple's self interested is aligned with our own because of their business model".

I'm cautiously optimistic about this, even if it is self-interested. Ads are very much a necessary evil rather than something desirable in society I think, and providing developers with an alternative business model isn't a bad thing.

> Ads are very much a necessary evil

Apple isn't blocking ads per se. They're reducing effectiveness of ads that don't respect user's privacy. The other kind of ads (e.g. sponsored videos, privacy friendly ads, etc) could still work.

I don't think ads that don't respect user's privacy are a necessary evil.

There's a bit of a spectrum between intrusive adverts and just malware, at some point we're going to need a definitive way to draw the line I think.

> privacy friendly ads

Out of curiosity, can you give examples of privacy friendly ads that indie devs can use?

If you’re talking about indie game developers, the way to go is to sponsor popular Twitch streamers and YouTube producers. If you know who these content creators are, you know a great deal about the tastes of their audience without having any identifying information from the audience itself.

If you write a game that the streamer/producer really enjoys, they might even continue to play your game after the sponsorship ends. This is the dream scenario because it’s free advertising that can sustain your game long term. These content creators can also provide a lot of valuable feedback because they tend to become experts at your game over a long period of time.

There was a great article in Wired recently about NPO’s efforts in the space. Unfortunately it’s not available as a service and is only an internal platform but there is definitely a model ripe for working on there.

https://www.wired.com/story/can-killing-cookies-save-journal...

Killing non-privacy-friendly ads is a great way to open up that market.

I'm actually ok with corporate self-interest if it benefits the consumers and their privacy.

I mean Google (the ad company) spent a lot of R&D money into making browsers and the internet faster. For me it means the internet is faster, for them they get more ad impressions and goodwill. Win-win, although they ballsed up the goodwill part.

An average web site isn’t any faster than it was 10 or 20 years ago (unless you still had a modem back then).

Overall the Web is in much worse place, with decentralized hyperdocuments replaced with centralized application server model. FB and Google turned internet into AOL.

They spent alot of money to make Javascript faster, so they could push apps from being local to being dumb terminals. Probably to ensure espionage and making the users reliant on big corp?

> Ads are very much a necessary evil rather than something desirable in society I think

You think advertising is 'evil'?

How far do you take that? For example does a listing in a local newspaper advertising a law cutting service count as evil? Is any form of telling people that you off a product or service really an act of evil?

Letting people know your product exists is fine. State of the art advertising, that is, propaganda aimed at maximizing sales, seems to have forgotten about ethics. I'd argue that advertising as a practice today is more evil than neutral or good.

>You think advertising is 'evil'?

Maybe they do, but using the idiom “necessary evil” doesn’t make it certain that they do. Probably nearly nothing colloquially described as a “necessary evil” is actually “evil”. It can be only a pain or an annoyance, but required.

>[…] the use of the term "evil" in the phrase does not necessarily indicate that the thing being characterized as a "necessary evil" is something that is generally considered an "evil" in the sense of being immoral or the enemy of the good.

— https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Necessary_evil

I'm using the common idiom, I don't think it's actually evil but in my opinion it's definitely a fundamentally negative practice that is unfortunately required to be used in the process of doing something otherwise positive. Servers and programmers aren't free, and if what you're doing is positive then you're still socially net positive despite the negative impact of advertising.

I'm not saying that all advertising is bad either, it's the specific case of B2C online advertising that compromises privacy and massively reduces the signal:noise ratio of the platform you're using. Sales and marketing aren't inherently bad in themselves, obviously.

Listing in a local newspaper in a section devoted to listings of such things is perfectly fine and desireable. Placing your ad anywhere where users do not explicitly go to look for such information that the ad offers is evil, yes.

" providing developers with an alternative business model isn't a bad thing."

There isn't really an alternative here. People won't pay for apps.

Also - ads not 'evil' - or rather, it's what people generally chose over paying 50 cents a month, and it's absolutely a choice on our (ie consumer) part.

The problem ironically has to do with relevance. People don't mind relevant ads, but in order to have relevant ads, networks need a lot of personal information. Ugly paradox.

And yes, spammy web pages/apps full of terrible, spammy ads - this is really of no benefit to anyone.

It would be nice if they worked towards fixing that.

I don’t think ads are a necessary evil at all. Facebook and Google came along and ruined the market for paid services. Prior to that the market was healthy and operated just fine.

If we undo the damage caused by FB and Google we can go back to a healthy market where people pay for things with money instead of their privacy.

Microsoft put Netscape and the concept of paying for a browser out of business long before FB and Google

Hotmail started the war on people paying for email clients long before gmail

MS certainly got the ball rolling with their anticompetitive behavior. But it was not until Facebook and Google created their spyware empires that it became essentially impossible to create paid content on the internet. Now the entire internet economy is broken.

> essentially impossible to create paid content on the internet

Really? I see far more paywalls now than I did 5-10y ago

I don't recall much paid content per-se from 2000, when Yahoo ruled the roost. Now I have multiple subscription services which exist only because of the internet

>I'm cautiously optimistic about this, even if it is self-interested.

I'd say that I'm cautiously optimistic about this, especially if it's self-interested. They're less likely to change their mind later if they actually benefit from it vs. empty posturing.

See Google's "Do No Evil" for a counter-example.

The strange thing is that they split the setting in two and happily left the "let Apple keep tracking you" as ON by default while leaving third party apps OFF by default.

A principled stance would just flip the default to OFF for both Apple and everyone else. With the strange treatment of developers on AppStore, I'm afraid they'll start abusing this to give edge to their own advertising on AppStore and elsewhere.

That would be a more principled stand. I didn’t know they had bifurcated it in that manner in the next OS release. Thank you for the heads up.

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/

Principles can be profitable...

Apple offers paid app discovery, and they want to increase that revenue. Facebook has historically been the paid channel for paid discovery. By limiting its effectiveness, Apple can grab that revenue.

Stratechery dug into this recently (see the "The Apple Vulnerability" section about 80% of the way down):

https://stratechery.com/2020/apple-and-facebook/

>Apple no longer has an ad network

Apple no longer has an ad network because advertisers were unhappy that it was not willing share user data.

>Apple knows names and addresses, geographic locations and app and music-purchase histories, and can show ad buyers that a group with specific characteristics also likes certain types of apps or music. However, its user tracking and ad targeting are not cookie-based, meaning agencies can't do automated buys via their cookie-centric trading desks, which allow them to mesh lots of data from different sources. Instead, they have to go to Apple, ask to reach a given audience and, well, trust Apple that it will deliver it.

One person familiar with the situation exec said Apple's refusal to share data makes it the best-looking girl at the party, forced to wear a bag over her head.

https://adage.com/article/digital/amazon-apple-catch-a-break...

Apple wanted an ad network that would allow developers to monetize free apps while still respecting end user privacy.

That's not what the people buying ads want.

Apple got $12 billion from Google to keep Google the default search engine in Safari in 2019. (See [1].) All that money comes from ads. If Apple was really principled about privacy, they'd develop their own privacy-preserving search engine or steer people toward another one. As it stands, the pro-privacy measures Apple has in place are good, but are only what's convenient to users, and they often serve to promote their own revenue channels. Further, Apple seems to be default-on-ing their own ad network, while default-off-ing tracking by others. (See [2].)

[1]: https://fortune.com/2018/09/29/google-apple-safari-search-en... [2]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/2020/08/07/apple-a...

[2] shows the prompt for third party tracking. It isn't off by default.

Good point about Apple making money off the Google search deal.

Maybe a search engine is in the works already (or a deal to buy Duck Duck Go).

It's not necessarily a principled campaign from Apple, and others have raised anticompetitive concerns around the fact that Apple's own apps are exempted.

But, it's still a good move for users, and it's still better than no change at all. Privacy advocates can't afford to only accept help from ideologically pure sources. We need allies. I'm not going to bash Apple over a change that will be mostly positive for end-users, just because Apple might have a few non-altruistic reasons for doing it. The privacy benefits from this change greatly outweigh any anticompetitive risks.

Ironically, I've commented this to the same effect in regards to Epic, but I think the advice applies to Apple critics as well: if you're too picky about who is and isn't allowed to advocate for you, eventually normal people and institutions will just stop advocating for you altogether.

>Apple no longer has an ad network

It's not entirely out of the ad business. See: https://searchads.apple.com/

Sounds to me like Apple built their company on the principle that they are able to make money without spying on their users. Sounds quite principled.

But they do spy on their users. There's plenty of telemetry telling them all sorts of things about you and use of "your" device. They merely spy in more acceptable ways and don't appear to sell any intimate info.

I'm not a big Apple fan. But if Apple thinks it makes business sense for them to be privacy-focused, that it would get more people to buy their products, i'm all for it!

And I know it doesn't block what could be an ads business for Apple but if we need to hand off our data to Big Tech, I'd rather have Apple get my data than Facebook.

#ChooseYourOwnEvil

Why would we need to hand off our data to Big Tech, though?

There are only 2 major mobile platforms so we don't have any choice if both decides to make money off our data.

You can nitpick on "need". Such typical HN response to focus on 1 word just to pick on something rather than the understand the whole message.

Please let's not get confrontational, I didn't mean it as a nitpick. I just think that there is a point at which we have to ask ourselves whether we truly need any of this. If all the options sucks, perhaps the only move is to drop all the options.

This is a fundamental misunderstanding of what's going on. In a battle between global megacorps over my personal data, I choose Apple over Facebook and its ad buyers. Ascribe to Apple whatever ulterior motives you want, but it doesn't change the fundamentals. "Wouldn't it be nice if no one had control over your data except you" is a pipe dream (in the US, anyway) and the best you can do is pick your poison when it comes to who owns your data.

Apple made the choice to monetize via cuts of in-app purchases rather than selling ads on its platforms as e.g. Windows does. This was a principled choice.

Apple tried and failed with iAds. I think they just waited too long, which Windows Phone learned from.

Just because it might be self-interested on one party’s behalf (Apple) doesn’t automatically invalidate the positive externalities.

Actually, maybe it'll provide data that personalized adds aren't that much more effective.

The personalization makes it easier to lie with statistics.

For example, did you know that 80% of people who purchased Product X saw a Product X advertisement through our network?

Sure, that was achieved by showing a Product X advertisement to people who'd just bought Product X (reversing cause and effect) but are you sure your marketing people would realise that and not be excited about how powerful this network is?

You can't make these targeting claims for an untargeted advertisement, and so idiots will believe they work regardless and there is a lot of idiot marketing budget.

Conventional adverts will have to be cheaper to compete, which means they earn less money for the host, which means that - for the intended audience of this Facebook message - those conventional adverts are definitively worse.

I don't run an ad blocker, although I do happily pay people who offer to give me a service without adverts for money.

As someone who almost never makes IAPs I am fine with this being a side effect of this desire. I’ve been blocking ads and tracking since... somewhere around 2001-4, I think? and I am pleased to have Apple’s goals temporarily align with mine in this fashion.

I think one of Apple's biggest mistakes was in not setting the precedent of taking a cut of app's advertising revenue. It creates an artificial subsidy for privacy-invading ads and is responsible for app bloat and App Store spam that degrades the user experience.

I also think 30% is too high across the board, but my point is simply that an incentive to employ inherently anti-privacy ad SDKs is unfortunate.

Apples Ad network was never important to them ever. Their behavior is better explained by privacy being a hugely important part of their product value.

We’ll just add this to the long list of privacy and security features that Apple has implemented for not necessarily principled reasons. I’ll see you in the top HN comment next time they come out with another one.

As it is, I'd like to encourage what feels like the only large corporate entity that cares even a little about users' privacy.

If there was even a single other large consumer company with a slightly better record on privacy than Apple, your view would be more understandable. As it is, at every turn industry after industry is getting infected with the "extract value through users' data" disease. Apple seems to be resisting that trend at least for now.

Sorry I though my sarcasm was obvious there. I was more commenting about how predictable and consistent it is that any time Apple does anything that’s pro-privacy/security/consumer, the top comment in the HN thread is without fail ‘yeah but Apple doesn’t actually care about any of that, this is just part of a conspiracy to promote their business interests’.

Aside from how remarkably consistent HN is at reproducing this, the funniest part to me is the sheer volume of things it has been said about (and then voted to the top of HN threads).

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