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Comment by mrgreenfur | Hacker News Reader

Lots of comments here on the watch unlock, while the new privacy controls are requiring apps to ask for IDFA before it's given (and before you'retracked across apps with any identifiers). The MarTech industry is panicking to adapt and become compliant and there are estimates that it will drop ad targeting by ~75%. I see this as a huge win for privacy, if Apple actually enforces it (They have given no guidance on how this will happen).

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also, a little poke in the eye of google: apple is proxying google's safe browsing lookups through its own servers so google gets less direct info about ios users.

Protect yourself against one giant tech corporation, by sending all your data through other giant tech corporation.

Apple is really great at marketing.

Better the devil you know. For now, I know that this devil doesn’t sell my information to hundreds of other devils.

It’s because they couldn’t figure out how to get better ROI from data processing than they get from positioning themselves as tron, fighting for the user.

Once they figure it out, their story will change very quickly. It’s naive to think that sending data to other huge company is proper solution.

It's because they don't have a business model that requires them to squeeze "ROI" lemonade from data processing lemons. Google's ad tech-driven business model will always require them to optimize that ROI. Their clients are advertisers and the advertisers want all the lemonade they can get and that snowball's the ROI.

Apple's clients are much more directly the users. Their financials seem to make it clear that they are way more profitable from user-oriented products and services than anything they could return on data processing and sale to advertisers or worse. They "couldn't figure it out", because they don't need to squeeze any lemons, they have far better things to sell than lemonade. (It's Google that looks far more undiversified beyond their single lame lemonade stand, and way more at risk if advertisers get bored of the taste of lemonade.)

Call me naive, but maybe having a formerly closeted homosexual baby boomer from Alabama at the helm underscores the stakes a bit.

It’s easy to have principles when they make you money. If current strategy will start to slow down, do you think shareholders will be more concerned with Tim’s personal story, or continued revenue growth? With or without Tim as a CEO.

CEOs are easily replaceable when business slows down. Especially if you aren’t rockstar founder, with majority of voting rights, and just a very effective administrator.

No doubt, but until that time - this CEO may take the threat of privacy loss a little more seriously than others who have not been part of a group that has been targeted for social and civil discrimination/violence.

True but Apple's current business model doesn't rely on advertising, unlike Facebook and Google.

Umm, Apple rakes in billions of dollars from ad revenue: https://9to5mac.com/2019/11/15/apple-ad-revenue/.

And Google's has brought in a lot of revenue from Hardware, Cloud, etc.: https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/3/21121492/google-hardware-m...

I think thinking of them as one dimensional companies is overly simplified.

Yuuuup. It's unclear to me if this is collateral damage, but it's also wreaking havoc in directly measuring the impact of your own ads (ex: see and ad for an app, install the app, make a purchase in the app - folks want to be able to tell if that purchase is attributable to that ad).

> Folks want to be able to tell if that purchase is attributable to that ad

Well, marketers and advertisers want to be able to tell if the purchase is attributable.

Everyday folks typically either don't care or would actively prefer not to be tracked in this way.

I think it’s a bit more nuanced than that. The new policy doesn’t seem to try to break ads attribution globally - e.g. the App Store ads attribution continues to work regardless of tracking transparency choices. They’re also not trying to prevent first-party tracking - i.e. app analytics and the like.

Apple could have thrown a bone to folks and just allowed passing url parameters or similar through the App Store links to the app after it’s installed. No third party needs to get the data and advertisers get to actually know ROI like they do with the rest of the web.

Alternatively I’d love if Apple actually took a stance against data aggregation. Take on the actual creepy corps like LexisNexis or Experian or Transunion. Interest tracking is peanuts by comparison. Not to say we shouldn’t start somewhere, but I hope tracking transparency doesn’t end here.

> Apple could have thrown a bone to folks and just allowed passing url parameters or similar through the App Store links to the app after it’s installed

I thought they already allowed this through deferred deep linking?

Hmm I’m not aware of a way to do that short of fingerprinting a browser and running the same fingerprint on app launch. Would you happen to have docs for that approach?

I thought that Universal Links supported this, but doing some more research it seems I was mistaken

> marketers and advertiser

I mean, they're certainly not robots or aliens, so what're they other than more folks? (Not that robots or aliens wouldn't also just be folks...)

it doesn't stop device fingerprinting and there'll be a bigger dash from virtually every company to fingerprint the hell out of all devices, get geolocation data, hoard up all possible IP information (wifi), identify nearby bluetooth device information and secure additional data points to link devices to users.

Apple is now rejecting apps caught using fingerprinting.

I don't know if I should be happy that Apple fixed that, or mad that they introduced the IDFA in the first place.

IDFA was initially introduced to discourage tracking via hardware such as serial numbers. Everything is an evolution.

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