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Comment by FemmeAndroid | Hacker News Reader

This followup issue seems to have a more clear writeup, especially for someone like me who is a bit out of the loop when it comes to the PSL:

https://github.com/privacycg/private-click-measurement/issue...

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While it does have quite a bit of details, this followup issue is clearly written by someone from FB or one of the other AdCos who wants to point the finger back at Apple. The tone and wording used here is rather rich and entitled.

you're not joking: https://github.com/privacycg/private-click-measurement/issue...

>Who will vet such a list continuously at a global scale? >Apple should. >Apple created this issue in the first place. The need for multi-tenant websites to add themselves to the PSL exists only because of the PCM design decision to limit measurement to registrable domains. The urgency exists because Apple's planned ATT enforcement.

They seem to think that people can’t really “opt out” of “tracking” (scare quotes theirs). Talk about entitled.

The quotes are entirely appropriate because adding some domain to the PSL makes the subdomains siloed cookie-wise so they can't share cookies and the PSL cannot use cookies anymore. Since they can't share cookies you can't track across even the same domain when added to the PSL.

This is a feature needed for sites like Rakuten, Shopify, Alibaba that have multiple merchants under the same domains.

Nothing to do with entitlement.

FB seems to believe they are entitled to the ability to track people on iOS. Apple is under no obligation to allow that.

Apple literally built a feature that requires addition to PSL to support a usecase that was addressed multiple times in the PrivacyCG meetings. How is this entitlement, they are following the Apple requirements.

Another thing that would follow Apple's requirements is just buying myweirdwebsite.com

The entire point of these generated subdomains is that you do not have to buy a domain name...

If you're at the point you're spending money on ads and need to track them, you can spend $10 on a domain name? Lots of these platforms also give away free domain names.

It's not about whether or not it's foolish - the point is buying and setting up a subdomain, handing SEO, etc. is often more complex than some small business owners want to deal with.

Which seems foolish if a company is serious about tracking revenue...

Seriously. I can see reasons that aren't entirely altruistic for Apple in trying to increase these privacy protections but trying to offload it back to Apple as if Facebook's abuse of consumer data isn't the real reason for this is ridiculous.

According to the comments in the history of that user on Github, it is someone who claims to be an engineer from Facebook in an earlier post: https://github.com/WICG/trust-token-api/issues/28#issue-6447...

Ben Savage is a pretty high-level engineer from Facebook's Ads org

This is fascinating to see Apple and Facebook engineers politely yet publicly arguing over potential technical implementations of Apple's privacy policies.

Benjamin Savage doesn’t look polite to me. Is it because I’m not a native speaker?

You're right, it's not that polite. "If Apple can develop a scaled process to review the millions of apps submitted to the Apple store, surely it is also capable of reviewing the few dozen multi-tenant domains that exist on the internet" is very passive-aggressive.

The linked discussion makes me wonder, how much of our existence on the internet is just an unintended consequence of some minor engineering decision? Whim of an unknown engineer creating or destroying million dollar industries down the line...

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