I understand the PSL managers' position that this is an unfair burden to place on them though.
I can think of other issues now too. For example, I think government services should be structured as subdomains instead of each department registering a separate domain. This will encourage the use of separate domains if they need to track effectiveness and that’s bad IMO. We don’t want to normalize stuff like irsonline.com because of the boost it gives phishing.
There’s definitely two sides to this one.
Isn't that part of the purpose of the changes that Apple is making? As a user, this seems like a great change. Less tracking is a positive.
For example, each location might want to track the effectiveness of ads for their locality. Facebook is probably a decent place for them to run ads too.
The big problem is that Facebook has earned a reputation of abusing all the data they collect, so most people are going to say the same thing as you and not have any sympathy, but it probably screws over the poster you’re replying to pretty bad.
This system will make ads worse, but I think it's an alright balance. Not being able to have any conversion tracking will make ads dismal.
I wish that Apple would work to maintain their own list that served this purpose, or provided support to the volunteers that were tasked with keeping this updated.
The “entropy limit” you see people talking about elsewhere in the thread is one means that attempts to allow ads to be measured like this without revealing information about the users. But if every store *.shopify.com is in the same entropy pool, there won’t even be enough information to tell which ad campaign led to a sale on which store.
There aren’t that many “build your own store” SaaS platforms, so it is feasible to maintain a whitelist.
It may sound strange at first to propose that Apple should be essentially auditing the behavior of other companies, but they have shown a willingness to pick up that mantle. Apple has already undertaken the huge effort of regulating the business practices of anyone on the App Store with the privacy label and other areas such as payments for digital goods. In this case, they’ve sort of delegated responsibility to a volunteer effort, which is understandable given how the situation evolved, but doesn’t seem sustainable.
*I haven’t clicked on an ad in a decade so I’m probably not the target audience
> Soon, these sites won't be able to run ads that track purchases, unless franchise.com is added to this list.
They still can, though, right? Just that they don't get more bits than if they had everything on one site. It's just that they can't "eat the cake and have it".