Google's iOS apps release cycle before and after Apple privacy labels | Hacker News Reader

Google's iOS apps release cycle before and after Apple privacy labels

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44 pointsZariel10 comments

https://techcrunch.com/2021/01/05/google-to-add-app-store-pr...

Looks like Google wasn’t being entirely accurate when they spoke to the press about this a month ago.

To be fair, even Apple chooses to use different wording about it's own privacy labels. They opt for a friendlier "allow personalized ads" instead of the scary sounding "allow X to track your activity across other companies' apps and websites" like they force third-party app developers to use [1].

I'm not defending Google's business model and I don't disagree with Apple's move to improved privacy. I just hate how hypocritical Apple is, and they always get away with it.

[1] https://mobiledevmemo.com/allow-this-app-to-personalize-adve...

So far Apple isn't doing perzonalized ads on third-party properties, 100% of their ads are on their own apps, so technically they don't require opt-in at all (Google, FB & others will keep doing first-party tracking regardless if you opt-it ATT or not)

This is bullshit.

1. Apple doesn’t track your activity across other company’s apps and websites.

2. Apple doesn’t require third party apps to request permission to allow personalized ads.

Apple is holding itself to a higher standard than it holds 3rd parties.

What’s the proof of that? There are enough probe points for them to gather data. For example, iCloud push notifications must give them some data on your activity in apps that they don’t control. They’ll have some idea of the apps you use and how frequently which is enough behavioral data to do targeted advertising if they wanted to in the future.

Now you may say that some data collection is unavoidable given the nature of the device (eg push messaging) but that’s often also true of other company’s products.

> What’s the proof of that?

I.e. there is no evidence, anywhere that they do this.

I don’t need to prove a negative. If you’re accusing them of something, provide evidence, otherwise this is just innuendo.

Secondly, even if they do have enough data to infer something about user behavior across websites and third party apps in some future in which we discover they were lying, that isn’t the same thing as intentionally tracking people across websites using explicit identifiers today.

It’s worth pointing out that they are aware of the inference problem and we know they sanitize their logs to alleviate it e.g. by anonymizing IP addresses etc before storage, although we also can reasonably guess that they haven’t achieved this universally yet.

> Now you may say that some data collection is unavoidable given the nature of the device (eg push messaging) but that’s often also true of other company’s products.

This is true, but irrelevant.

Apple discloses what they collect, and there is no double standard in what they are asking others to do.

It’s the claim of a double standard that is complete bullshit.

Is there a privacy nutrition label published for how the App Store or Push services use data? How do they use information about what apps I’ve purchased, used, or rated? Or my App Store search queries?

>Shortly after its acquisition of Shazam last year, Apple took the music tagging application ad-free. To follow-up on that change, Apple has now removed nearly all third-party SDKs from the app as well.

Apple has removed the following SDKs from Shazam: AdMob, Bolts, DoubleClick, Facebook Ads, Facebook Analytics, Facebook Login, Inmobi, IAS, Moat, and Mopub.

https://9to5mac.com/2019/02/20/shazam-third-party-sdks/

Between Terreria and this Google seems very intent on not addressing bad PR recently and just hoping that it blows over.

Possibly could have worked during the trump era when the news cycle was like whiplash, but now people will hopefully pay more attention.

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