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Comment by ghughes | Hacker News Reader

That thread between FB & Apple is fascinating. The potential solutions being discussed have significant implications:

1. Apple: "not support eTLDs in PCM and only support TLDs" - so no more ad attribution for multi-tenant domains.

2. Facebook: "some sort of vetting process to determine who is using subdomains in a way that is aligned with the intended purpose of the PSL" - so Apple takes over the PSL inclusion process and institutes strict vetting to prevent abuse of PCM, which would presumably take months to implement.

This looks like a serious design problem with no solution that could be implemented before ATT drops.

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> That would cause tremendous harm to all the small businesses who operate on subdomains of TLDs like myshopify, and for what?

This was the giveaway that it was an FB person. Parts of that comment is verbatim from FB propaganda ads[0]. Maybe that awkward video from ~last month[1] was targeted more at aligning FB employees internally around the message, not the general public.

[0] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-12-16/facebook-...

[1] Which I can’t find now

Do you have an actual response to this point or are you just criticizing that multiple people made that same argument?

These people believe they’re lucky to work at a place like Facebook, and after reading some of these asinine comments, I'm inclined to agree.

The idea that they shit in the pool and get the swimmers to defend them sounds crazy, but people do defend Facebook’s doo-doo, and it makes sense that if you’re already covered in shit, it’s probably easier to pay people like this to walk around with shit all over themselves and say with a straight face “Apple should pay for our shit” than I ever thought.

> This was the giveaway that it was an FB person.

I mean, they also say "Facebook finds itself in the position of trying to help advertisers navigate Apple’s ATT changes - answering a wide variety of questions. We ..." I think everyone involved knows this is an issue from FB?

The biggest problem is that no matter what “scale” of tracking is tolerable on a single domain / subdomain, Facebook still gets the aggregate.

So if you fix it for small multi-tenant domains, nothing changes for Facebook and they still get all the aggregate data, right?

There’s going to be a lot of collateral damage before ads and tracking get fixed IMO.

ATT?

App Tracking Transparency

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/apptrackingtranspa...

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