Max Schrems hits Apple with complaints over ad-tracking device
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
I don't often donate, but i feel like this is a very good cause; I'm often frustrated by the privacy abuse of big tech, yet at the same time i can't stop using its products because there are no proper alternatives (i believe it's called "oligopoly"...)
So, this way i hope to help support restoring the balance, even if it's just a small donation.
So, this is what Schrems is after, but it will happen with or without their action.
That's already in progress and in this case it's pretty much about the exact same practice on Apple platforms.
(Also please note how iOS 14 has a separate switch for Apple Ads tracking identifier which is ON by default.)
They argue that with the planned changes, Apple still creates a IDFA, and while it will allow users to restrict other apps from using it, Apple itself still can. Additionally they want users to be able to have no IDFA at all.
If Apple breaks the rules by placing "cookies" without user consent/knowledge, they may need to be fined.
Whether they may or may not stop abusing the rules in the future, is a secondary issue.
Wait, so if I don't want to be tracked, their solution is to sign in to an account which is tied to my meatspace name and credit card?
indexedDB isn't implemented in Firefox's private mode. [0]
So if you can guess that it is Firefox, and can't use indexedDB, then you can guess that you're in private mode.
But there are other differences you can look for under Chrome, the simplest of which is that navigator.storage is smaller whilst incognito mode is active.
And under Safari you can just check if localStorage actually stores things.
Session cookies AFAIK are allowed under the US and EU privacy regs and are necessary for some sites to function, for better or worse.
Thats the official press release of Schrems organization.
Apple has been working for years to reduce and ultimately give the user opt-in control of the exact tracking that they have been targeted for here.
They already have the code in place to do this, and the only reason it isn’t this way now is pushback and a campaign by Facebook that it might be anticompetitive for them to use their power over the operating system to limit the ad industry this way.
The lawsuit seem like a good thing, because tracking should be opt in, but also because a legal precedent would indemnify Apple against this being held against them in an antitrust investigation.
I think you forgot that the user owns the computer and gets to decide what code runs. Not facebook, the ad industry or apple.
They do get their pick of OS, but they don't get to decide what the OS allows, beyond what's available as a configuration.
They can tinker with the OS settings (where available) or even code if they have it, but most users don't have the knowledge or time to do so, even if their OS of choice is FOSS.
It is an ideological denial of computer science.
Nobody decides for themselves what code runs on their computer beyond the tiny fraction for which they understand the source code.
They only decide where the code comes from, and to what extent they trust the origin.
This lawsuit is specifically targeting a pro-privacy feature.
Because of all the privacy abusing big tech companies they don't seem the worse to me.
And before someone call me a fanboy, I don't own even one Apple device.
There have been a bunch of opinion blog posts recently. Some of them are clearly ideological attack pieces, but I don’t see any coordination. Apple had a real outage that caused a real problem.
Also, the people posting the attack pieces or echoing their points all seem like regular contributors and don’t look like bots or throwaway accounts.