Comment by lilyball | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lilyball | Hacker News Reader

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It looks like Apple's advertising targeting isn't using the same info that they're trying to withhold from third parties though. I actually have it off on my device so I can't see what the "View Ad Targeting Information" says (if I turn it back on, it says I have to wait 24 hours before it has the info to show me), but from the description it does show, it sounds like the ad target uses "account information and interactions with Apple services" for serving ads. Which is to say, this is information Apple already has, and all you're saying is "please don't use that info for serving ads". It does not sound like it reduces the information Apple has (which makes sense, any PII not necessary for running Apple's services is not sent to Apple except after undergoing differential privacy).

Compare this with third-party advertising, where the use of IDFA does explicitly hand information to third parties that they otherwise wouldn't have. For example, the Facebook SDK is integrated into a bazillion different apps, so Facebook can track a single user across all of these different apps even if the user doesn't use Facebook login (or if they use Facebook login for a single one of these apps, Facebook can then associate the usage of all the other apps with that same login too).

The two are not remotely equivalent.

Facebook’s big ad business on mobile is advertising to install apps. That’s also Apple’s ad business on mobile (ads shown on Apple News, and in the App Store itself). For Facebook to show attribution of ad conversions, they must do tracking “across apps” (from their app where the ad was clicked, to the advertiser’s app). For Apple to do the same attribution, they can call it “interactions with Apple services”, because the purchase is done through the App Store. In that sense, both are going after the same user actions but different language can be used to describe them.

What's crazy is that these are supposed to be complementary effects. The more apps that are installed on Apple's platform the more money that Apple makes, but apparently that's not enough for them.

Once way to think of this is as an effort get a greater than 30% cut on the App Store. One of the things I’m supposed to be purchasing with that cut as a developer is discoverability. If users search for my app by name and somebody else’s app comes up first, it starts to feel like 30% isn’t getting me the full offering.

Now, I might go buy some ads from Facebook, because they provide a good value there. In the future, my only choice will be Apple, who won’t have to compete on price anymore because they cornered the market.

They seem pretty equivalent to me. You have a site or service send usage information to an ad network and the ad network returns an ad to show. The only difference here is that in the case of Apple they own both the service and the ad network.

Yes that's correct. Apple is basically reducing the fidelity of the rest of the ad ecosystem to the level they're already at themselves.

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