Analytics suggest 96% of users leave app tracking disabled in iOS 14.5
macrumors.com
macrumors.com
If this holds, this will be cataclysmic for FB. You can't have a huge portion of your wealthy user base just disappear and expect advertisers to keep paying what they were paying previously.
BTW, this is also why the covid exposure notification apps failed miserably. They should have always been opt-out.
This IMO makes two scenarios likely:
1) The market is currently just dragging along, hoping this will all go away and we're really in a major ad-bubble that's about to pop.
2) Tracking... isn't that profitable after all. All the personalized tracking shit can be replaced with a simple "users who clicked on canon printer also clicked on cheap ink refill kits" type of model that gets the same results or better. Which also puts into question a lot of what FB and Google are actually doing.
FB's stock prices hasn't changed because we haven't seen if this really impacts revenue to FB. We know that banner ads are extremely ineffective. So if FB ads are still more effective than that, they will continue to capture the lion's share of ad revenue.
They have a pretty huge privacy section in android settings where you can see exactly what data they have on you and how to opt out and/or delete existing data.
When you set up android, it ask you if your want in or out. You can even set up a new android device without a Gmail account and disable all Google services including Gmail and search. I don't belive you can do this with iOS.
(Yes, I know there are some hacks to get around that )
All those nice settings (for google and everyone else) are only for the minimum they are required by law. That means anything that they can claim to be "anonymized" is fair game and not visible to you in any way.
One thing I really do appreciate about Google products is that I'm able to fully disable personalization. My Youtube homepage is completely depersonalized, because I went through their privacy settings and switched off everything. I can't say whether or not Google is still secretly tracking me, but my biggest concern is actually that algorithmic recommendations put me in a filter bubble. Google lets me turn off the bubble.
Amazon, by contrast, does not let me depersonalize my recommendations. Neither does Netflix. There was a period of several years where I would periodically go through my Amazon history and manually mark everything as a gift. This worked for a time, but abruptly stopped one day. I assume Amazon decided I'd marked too many things as gifts and my selections should be ignored.
Did you receive any ads in spanish or chinese recently? did you see any political ad to a party you vehemently oppose? All that is still decided by your profile and history. Just with hocus pocus anonymization on the front end.
So google is not that different from netflix and amazon. they just give you a blanket.
That was how it was done for a long time. Advanced tracking was just a way to try and keep increasing revenue.
Whether it worked or not, only the higher ups at these companies can tell... probably.
Personally in the old days of newspaper ad's, I always wondered what the point was of anything smaller than a whole page; what is the point of a 1x1 inch ad in the midst of 200 others. Even today I ignore 99% of what's on the page other than the content.
In fact many people only bought the paper on ad day.
Whole different kettle of fish.
This happens on every single HN thread on this topic. I'm not a total expert but there is a lot of arm chairing that's wrong.
Tracking is profitable and more so than contextual for a lot of direct response in a lot of industries.
Not in all cases, e.g. usually not for brand advertising. But it works.
For my clients is the direct data I have - and we have extensively tried every single other option. FB is the only platform that delivers strong ROI and we use the targeting iOS blocks. And yes - it's always retorted - I know 100% the donations come from the ads, it's incredibly simple to track even as simple as making a new page or individual product only linked from that ad.
So far this change is definitely effecting our ads and FB seems pretty buggy with the new ads manager changes. But they 'always find a way.' But so far it's not as bad as I originally thought it would be.
Plus you can still upload offline conversion data. most purchases have full contact info. We'll see if Apple comes after that, but they would then have to go after the entire ecosystem including Visa.
If Google or Apple remotely installed a hastily built tracker controlled by a government agency on my device I'd be pretty miffed about it.
> Except it wasn’t hastily built
They were built very hastily with little oversight with iterative beta cycles in plain sight.
> nefarious way that you’re implying
I didn't imply any nefarious intent what so over. All I implied is that your location data is being tracked and put into some database somewhere and you don't control it.
Who has this data? No idea. How will it be used a year from now? 10 years from now? No idea. Does it draw more energy on my device or use more processing power? No idea.
That alone is enough to not use it.
In this system, it’s not easy at all for government agencies to track you. That was very explicitly part of the design, as is shown in all the public docs. It’s not like how it works is a secret [1].
Your location isn’t being tracked and put into a database. Nothing about exposure notifications uses location.
No idea if it's using the official API or what.
I honestly just don't believe that it can work well enough in some places. Especially here in Hawaii where gatherings are on a beach and people leave their cellphones in their car or backpacks or whatever. I was even recently at a camp where people were sharing a blunt and there wasn't a single phone in sight cause it was out of signal range. Could have easily been a super spreader event and the tech solution would have failed.
I get that you have an axe to grind here for some reason but I'm not even sure what point you're trying to make.
That it strays into the irrational at times is as human as the inevitable corruption that fuels the mistrust.
For someone without full knowledge of the technology to assume (in this case wrongly) there's a privacy issue is entirely practical. It's an assumption that will be correct far more than it won't.
People are responding to fear of past president. One could argue that it is highly unlikely that it will happen again. One could even PROVE that it is NOT happening again NOW - but you are still dealing with someone responding out of fear.
I feel like we are seeing the exact same phenomenon with (SOME) people who respond out of fear of catching the virus.
I would be really interested to learn more about why some people 1) are fearful of government tracking 2) are fearful of the virus 3) aren't fearful of either.
Personally I've watched my self move between all 3 over the past year - it has been a WILD ride
There were many locations who built their own apps that did not follow this privacy model, or used it incorrectly, but for most cases "your location data being put into some database" is not accurate.
We agree then.
That <something> by the way is to take the database that's only on your phone (and never uploaded) and show only you an alert. That's it.
If this is immoral, but letting covid spread around the world and have people needlessly suffer because you refuse reasonable interventions, then I don't know what is moral.
This is patently wrong. Exposure Notification apps (those using the official APIs, anyway) have no access to location APIs. The absolute worst they could possibly do is to log your IP address when you reach out for new data, but this is also true of every app you use, and every website you visit.
You don't really seem interested in understanding how they actually work, but if anyone else cares, https://ncase.me/contact-tracing/ is a pretty reasonable explanation.
The amount of data that the Covid tracking API of Android and iOS makes available is precisely known. Germany's and a few other (https://joinup.ec.europa.eu/collection/open-source-observato...) are open source.
> Who has this data? No idea.
The users on their individual devices.
> How will it be used a year from now? 10 years from now? No idea.
It will be all but useless.
Except if you're in Singapore. Their tracing app morphed into a spy software for law enforcement: https://twitter.com/kixes/status/1384566617330229250
That just doesn’t make sense to me.
I still have it on my phone (although at least within my house I’m blocking their metrics via pinhole) but I 100% understand why someone would not want it on their phone.
What are you able to infer about the contents exactly?
https://github.com/cds-snc/covid-alert-app/blob/97bb16034140...
But the fact that they could be tracking which citizens have and have not been shown a "You have been exposed to Covid" alert, and there's no way to opt-out, is a little scary.
> What are you able to infer about the contents exactly?
Most days, you are not exposed to covid and you don't interact with the app. So most days, the app transmits a "background-check" event to the server. This means the contents of the message will be the exact same length every day.
As a passive listener, then, you can watch for days where the length of the message is abnormal, and then because there's only so many different kinds of messages that the app sends and they all have unique lengths, you can infer what metrics events must have been sent to the server based on the delta of the message lengths. You can figure out if a user has been shown a "You have been exposed to COVID" based purely on passive listening to traffic from the device.
Right away I notice the glaring omission of “the surveillance state” in the wording of certain sentences like “People who test positive are not identified to other users, Google or Apple“.
“With Bob’s consent, his phone uploads the last 14 days of keys for his broadcast beacons to the cloud”, also giving away his geolocation in the process. My read of the “doesn’t collect location data” is “doesn’t explicitly collect location data”, like just because it doesn’t send a field ‘geolocation’ they can technically say that and not be lying. You should check out one of my very favorite blog posts of all time: https://kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/2013/06/09/using-metad...
And even then the default OS on the newer pinephones uses KDE as a DE which had telemetry built in at one point.
What happened next was people stopped going out with their phones, because any exposure would result in a Police enforced 14 day quarantine
I'm extremely skeptical that a big chunk of people in such a highly online country just left their phones at home. Maybe some of the Hardeim but I would guess 95+% of people wouldn't do this.
Would you really bring your phone with you, when going out for a beer or coffee, even if it could easily result in you being forced to stay quarantined for 2 weeks?
Is your smartphone really that important to you?
Even though I have personally stayed socially distanced and worn a mask everywhere it was required, it makes perfect sense to me, after seeing how a lot of people have reacted to the pandemic, that a good portion of the population, would let their phone stay at home, so they would not risk a police enforced quarantine.
In israel, this was done centrally by cell tower triangulation rather than app/os, so no way to opt out even with dumb phones. However, reliability was not very good - e.g. people got notice that they must quarantine because a neighbour 2 floors up was positive, or because they stood outside a wall of a closed room where a positive person was on the other side of said wall. The appeal process was initially non-existent, then slow and cumbersome - so the risk of being "jailed" for 14 days due to false positive was small but serious.
Granted the fidelity and latency of SkAdNetwork is a concern but hardly enough to materially impact the bottom line.
Absolutely not. Using defaults because you know most people wont' change them to achieve a specific outcome that you, the default setter want, is exactly the same evil. Just because you're doing it for "good" doesn't justify it.
Even more, it speaks to the power of removing choice. When app tracking is enabled by default it effectively removes choice because most users never touch settings (and may not even know they exist). Therefore users are not choosing anything. Someone else is choosing for them. "Tech" company employees will respond to criticism of their employer's behaviour with something like: "But users can choose to turn this off." That is not relevant if 96% are unaware of this "choice". The question is: why is tracking on by default. That was a choice the user did not make.
Only when faced with a screen asking the user if she chooses to be tracked do we get a chance to find out what a user would choose. And even then, developers will use "dark patterns" to manipulate the decision-making process toward a self-serving outcome.
Perhaps we should ask ourselves whether there should even be a setting to enable tracking. If the majority of users would choose to turn it off, if they were presented with the choice, then why even have it. This is essentially "privacy by design".
This is no different than when developers argue to HN that it is not worth catering to the preferences of privacy-conscious or minimalist users since those users comprise such a small percentage of users overall. By the same token, it should not worth catering to the small percentange of users who want to be tracked.
Still shouldn't be on by default, but asking up-front seems perfectly reasonable.
A service provider makes one decision and it impacts N users. A user consumes from M service providers. A user evaluating whether a service provider is trying to “pull one over” on them in the TOS costs M units of time, 1 unit per service provider. A service provider deciding to choose the cow path as the default saves N units of time and costs the service provider 1 unit.
I engage with service providers that respect my time. If I suspect your default is user hostile, and provide a “we won’t exploit you in this relationship” as an option, I look elsewhere.
This breaks down in places though. Example: I haven’t found a communication provider that doesn’t default to building a profile on me and selling it to anyone willing to pay.
The lack of choice for me makes me wish a governing body would intervene and give me a marketplace where I didn’t have to waste my valuable time making sure the person I was engaging with wasn’t going to pull one over on me.
I opted into the FB tracking when I got the popup yesterday because I do FB/IG a lot and I click on interesting ads. Honestly, I tend to buy quite a bit from the ads that I see because they genuinely interest me, and a lot of them are from smaller businesses that I want to try out. If I see ads on FB/IG, at least I want them to be relevant to me rather than be generic.
That’s what people wanted for so long The choice to choose , nothing more nothing less.
It was not an option of choosing an alternative from the default, the order was random. Same for the default search engine.
If this was setup in the same way i wonder what the ratio would be. With that i mean a fair yes/no choice, not the GDPR-joke where accept is a big green button and reject is hidden in confusing fine print 3 sub-pages deep.
They also just hired Facebook’s first ads targeting product manager to work for their ad platform. I don’t think Apple ads won’t be limited to the App Store within a couple years.
But there is no core value that is anti-tracking or anti-ad, and all of these policies can be reversed the moment they no longer post a threat to people's enjoyment of Apple products.
So I don't think those policies are in danger of being reversed based on "threat to enjoyment"; I think they're more in danger of being reversed based on "measurable threat to profit" somewhere down the road -- but probably most in danger of being reversed, long-term, by executive shuffle.
https://www.theverge.com/2021/4/21/22385859/apple-app-store-...
They even called out google and Facebook 10 years ago and were vilified for it.
What Apple's doing here is trying to undercut in a serious way the ability for everyone to be able to do the kind of granular tracking we have today all over the place.
I'm not shocked they're building / expanding an ads division. The real key is this: will their ads be served up with the kind of granular, identifiable tracking we have today? My gut feeling is no, it won't be[0]
[0]: As an aside, I want to note the following:
When I say tracking or speak of it in this context, I do not mean simple metrics, like how many page views did this get compared to Ad B? That is the kind of, well, tracking, that can be done in a way that isn't privacy invasive (and should never be invasive), akin to A/B testing. Technically, error logs are a form of tracking, if we want to be pedantic. Instead, I to point out that I'm talking about granular tracking data that can be used to identify a person or granular set of data that can sort people into unique groups that then make it easy to identify them. The real quandary here of course, is that in some cases Facebook, Amazon, Google and others have enough data to actually be able to say oh hey, this is no_wizard, not some other person. Thats a huge part of this problem, however, its also not always the case that they can harvest enough data to be able to do that. The other, often overlooked issue by many (particularly those that don't follow this sort of thing. Not likely your average HN reader but probably most people you know, is that they also have the heustristic data that confidently sort people into little groups, and they are constantly continuing this narrowing. So instead of saying hey, this is no_wizard they can say, well, looks like someone who identifies as no_wizard believes in these causes, has these purchasing habits, and has seen these ads, along with x people from Y area, lets put them in Z group
I know people get upset (ever so rightly) about being personally tracked, but both issues need to be systemically addressed. Its not about ads, its about what ads became, and through that we now have this kind of detailed tracking all over the place, from mobile SDKs to CLIs to most popular websites.
I would welcome an Apple Ads platform that went against all this and could prove it
The ads won't get better regardless of the data they have on you. They aren't exactly using ML or AI to help you get better ads. Its really just boring data queries in SQL or some graph language. That's the sum total of most advertising intelligence. Its not 21st century high tech. Its mostly relational databases with some NoSQL to make that table linking faster and cached. In cases where they do actually bring out that NoSQL it is to reimplement all the relational smarts just with extra steps. Then its at least shiny and cool.
The whole thing is really just about storing and gathering a profile on you as part of them building an asset they can later resell. Creepy technology for creepy uses. An asset full of subtle errors about you that can likely never be seen or fixed. Much later they will invariably then leave all or some of it on a usb stick or some poorly protected cloud server. After that your details will end up in the hands of some scammer or other miscreant to enable them to send you endless emails full of typos, lies, emojis and if you're exceptionally average like the rest of us: an interesting tale about long lost nigerian princes just needing a bank account. If you're lucky.
So, yeah, leave it disabled. There's really no point in doing otherwise.
However... I'm not sure how the discussion about the technology behind ad targeting is relevant to the end user. The point is that it -works- and that the ads shown to the user are indeed more likely to pique their interests. As an end user, I don't -care- whether the backend is using AI/ML or a relational database—I care that by enabling tracking, I get more relevant ads.
They're more likely to convert the targeted user. That's not the same thing.
They most certainly are, and this is not a secret.
While there is complexity, diversity, and numbers on the end-user side, there aren’t enough advertisers to warrant such hair splitting data crunching.
There are only so many jogging pant brands out there.
1. Show you ads that are more personalized
2. Help keep Facebook free of charge
3. Support businesses that rely on ads to reach their customers
Source: https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/69222710/...
While "better ads" could be construed as a benefit for users, the other two reasons seem like an attempt to scare/guilt the user into enabling tracking. Of course, it's just a bunch of bullshit they had the marketing department come up with so they could continue to profit from tracking at least a small percentage of iOS users. Businesses don't need to rely on Facebook's invasive tracking to sell products. Don't let Facebook guilt you into giving up your personal data.
That’s the setting in iOS under Settings > Privacy > Tracking.
What does it actually mean?
If it’s turned off, does that means that apps are tracking you since they don’t have to ask?
If it’s turned on, does that mean apps have to ask and you can disable tracking per app?
Something feels very strange about the way this setting is worded. I’d have excepted something like: “Allow Apps to Track” [ On | Off ]
The default in this case is to outright disallow it for any app requesting.
If the option is on then the app can ask, and the user has a choice to allow or disallow. Again, if it's off, the default is to disallow tracking.
So if you don't want this asking you everytime you open any app (based on my experience it happens frequently) you can turn it off.
But yes, it could use a better wording.
Source: I'm a newly role changed iOS developer at my job.
Apple's explanation for wording it this way is that it's impossible to block all tracking through technical means at the system level because there will always be new nefarious tricks that malicious people will try to use against you. They can only do it at the policy level and try to punish bad actors.
If it's turned off: I want to opt out of all app tracking automatically
It really doesn't mean anything other than that. It's a binary decision.
WSJ: "Why the verbiage 'Ask Not to Track'? Why not just 'Do Not Track'?"
Federighi: "There are other techniques that developers over time have developed, like fingerprinting, which is a bit of a cat and mouse game around other ways that an app might scheme to create a tracking identifier. And it's a policy issue for us to say 'you must not do that'. And so, we can't ensure at the system level that they're not tracking, [but] we can do so at a policy level."
How is Flurry Analytics measuring app tracking on iOS devices? Are they just reporting how much they themselves are being disabled?
[0] https://www.flurry.com/blog/ios-14-5-opt-in-rate-att-restric...
I’ve seen quite a few reports from different providers in the last couple of weeks and suspect the _real_ average of opt-ins is considerably higher.
I’m hoping to see some numbers from Apple at WWDC, which I expect would be in the 30-50% opt-in. Why? Because some apps (like Facebook) make it seem like it’s mandatory to opt-in. And I believe that if you opt-in for Facebook you’re more inclined to just hit that same button for every app…
But… I don’t think that popup was designed to get the HN folk to opt in but rather those that use Facebook (and Instagram, which has the same language) to communicate actively.
It’s really the pre-prompt I’m referring to here, which, as one of its bullet points for why you should opt in, says it helps keep Facebook free.
That’s a big statement to drop in a tiny bullet point, which makes me feel like they thought about it a lot. Meaning, it’s very targeted.
Only still have an account because my mom blogs on Facebook
I've seen apps fail audit because of the pre-text.
I Worte about a few, including McDonald’s which uses misleading language and a popular game that shows a fake prompt altogether.
https://appfigures.com/resources/this-week-in-apps/20210430#...
I know, right? Explain to me how anyone made any money at all 20 years ago?
Seriously though, can we get back to making good products that sell themselves?
Joke aside, I believe most people don't understand what this iOS popup wants from them: for most average users, it's another annoying popup that their device shows them and they don't really know what it means or what option they should choose (like the location ones, networking ones, bluetooth, ...). It happens a lot with the older generation, but even as a tech person I sometimes just don't know what is the right choice.
So it's so easy for someone to choose the "wrong" option, when it's presented with too few information or at a wrong time, like refusing the location service and then Waze doesn't work, because they just don't know they have to allow it.
I believe these choices should be handled by Apple through the store and not by the users: if the app is doing something shady with ads or location, the app should be disabled before it reaches the user's device; the user shouldn't have to "know" those things, the user has no way to check or validate that the usage is legitimate.
We will end up with devices where the user has to know nothing, cannot do anything and is lazy and easily led.
Just as moving yourself around on a bike is healthier than planting your ass in your car, so is thinking for yourself and _once_ in your life taking the time to figure out what that whole location sharing thing actually means.
Maybe there should be something like a "root" or "developer" setting that can be enabled for advanced users, but for the average person the default for all this must be the best possible option already and they don't need to worry about it.
I've thought one member of my family to setup their own wireless access point. And they can reliably solve most 'the internet does not work' problems on their own now. This member used to confuse the explorer.exe window with a picture of an explorer.exe window in internet explorer, with predictable results (at the time)...
I'd rather live in the latter world than the former, time will tell if more people agree with me.
Sounds like a good summary for iPhone.
It's a side effect of eliminating friction when interacting with the product. Having to stop and read manuals or reflect or such is a big no-no and interferes with "engagement".
And it's wildly successful and common to cater to and foster intellectual laziness instead of, say, furthering education or individual mündigkeit.
Also, what rock do you live under? I want to join you.
But sure, you guys have fun living under your rock and being super educated on the nuances of mobile ad targeting technology. The rest of us idiots will waste our time doing intellectually lazy things like spending time with our kids and living in the real world.
The iPhone is probably relatively free compared to the streamlined hassle-free applications and devices of the future. And all the while polarization in all our societies grows, until my government too has no option but to lock it down and forge social cohesion through state-sponsored psy-ops and information-ops. We'll be well on our way to a 1984 dystopia then. ---
And please, it's not like there's not time for a normal life. See my comment about my family member below. Maybe if tech people would just refuse to fix the internet, more people would understand how it works.
Too many conflicting interests have built up..
They do screen out nefarious tracking to the extent that they can detect it.
This choice is about consensual tracking.
I think users ultimately do have to know something about these things.
Incredibly mild inconvenience for the benefit of having the default option be not tracking me unless I specifically allow it.
> I’ve chosen be the 4% of population. I prefer to say to every app “ask not to track” and see what apps are currently trying to track users.
Smart, but a bit misguided. In iOS Settings>Privacy>Tracking the text below the toggle for “Allow Apps to Request to Track” says:
> Allow apps to ask to track your activity across other companies’ apps and websites. Apps that don’t ask may still try to track your activity.
> "Allow apps to ask to track your activity across other companies' apps and websites"
So far it's been Instagram and Sony's Headphones App. I do not have facebook.
So the odds of seeing the prompt in the wild aren’t too high unless you’re a Facebook user.
But as more apps show the prompt and it’ll become very common all you need is to agree once and you’ll then be more likely to opt in more than opt out, in my opinion.
I expect that 10k to 10x before the end of the year. Even then, 100k apps out of ~2M isn’t all that many, so it might take a long time for advertisers to regain the kind of access they had pre ATT.
ESPN, Hulu and Cruncyroll issue thepop up. Consider the reach of those 3 apps alone compared to the bottom 500k.
Yes, 10K isn’t a lot, and the big apps are included in the 10K.
But… companies like Google Need as many apps as possible to funnel data to them so they can profile _everyone_, and they do that with their “free” services like Firebase (aka Google Analytics), in addition to ads.
To Firebase it’s all about scale (aka visibility) and not specific groups.
"App tracking" here means reading your device ID, called the 'Identity For Advertisers' (IDFA for short). They do this so that they can cross reference that IDFA with data that other apps have collected on that same IDFA, allowing them to connect the dots that it's the same user.
This app tracking transparency feature makes it so that they can't access your IDFA, and can only show you ads based on info you provide within their own app, not from the other apps you use. It keeps your data silo-ed to each app.
This is where the whole "I looked up nike shoes on Amazon and now I'm getting nike shoe ads on Facebook" comes from. Without the IDFA, Facebook has no way of knowing what you looked up on Amazon, only what you look up on Facebook.
Can this really be true? Wouldn't the conclusion be "Facebook can no longer rely on the IDFA for this information, but can probably gather it by a different ID shared between both Amazon and Facebook?"
That's not really true, as far as I know. FB provide a feature called custom audiences, which can take a set of emails and match them to FB users. Amazon could easily upload this list and use it to target on FB.
Apple can't really prevent advertisers/platforms from sharing information from other sources. What they can stop is apps using IDFA as a primary key for a particular Apple user, and that's what they appear to have done.
I especially don't understand the complaint from Facebook with reference to the four plus apps they have where users may very well just use the same account. As it stands, they've been wildly inconsistent about this. Here is Mark Zuckerberg only six weeks ago claiming this change would be good for Facebook: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/03/as-apple-app-trackin...
Apple is disrupting whole economy for apps. It’s a very broken economy, with lots of questionable practices, that’s for sure. But we’ll see if it’ll be net benefit for customers. For sure for Apple, as more apps will have to move to be paid, and give Apple their 30% cut.
It’s not presented to an user as a way to pay for the app. It’s presented as something that’s third party, not really related to an app.
I've been wondering why people aren't asking what kind of data is Apple itself collecting?
Not only from users, but from the marketplace. Shouldn't users also give consent to what they share with Apple? Shouldn't businesses also choose to share info with Apple?
This is gave us a sense of "justice as been done", but now we should look deeply into what the gatekeeper is doing, to what benefit, and how balanced it made the playing field.
Truth be told, I'm biased because I'm always suspicious of Apple because I always believed that unlike what they preach, they put Apple first above everything else... but I only see them getting an exclusive view of user behavior on their devices.
Interestingly, Apple's Ad tracking doesn't show up under 'Settings > Privacy > Tracking' but instead tucked away at the bottom of the 'Settings > Privacy' menu. Apple's tracking also defaults to opt-out instead of the opt-in route taken for other apps.
I am all for providing privacy settings but whats with the double standard?
/s
You do that when you accept their terms.
For a long time they’ve had an “on device” policy to handling data. Buy a new phone and your frequently visited locations list is empty. Most of their AI stuff only lives on your device.
Of course there are limits to what can be handled on your device, but they’re generally pretty open about what happens where.
Make no mistake, the privacy stance is a profit maker for Apple, and that’s the real reason they’re doing it.
In any case, I’m way more likely to trust Apple with my data than Google or Microsoft. Google and (to some extent) Microsoft has based their business around collecting and/or selling my data, Apple makes a living by selling me hardware and software, and privacy is the one parameter that Apple can compete on that will directly reduce profits of its competitors.
https://www.apple.com/privacy/docs/A_Day_in_the_Life_of_Your...
As well as https://www.zdnet.com/article/apple-data-collection-stored-r...
When you said:
>While I’m sure Apple collects ample (pseudo anonymous) data from their respective stores about patterns, they actually don’t gather that much data about you.
I don't doubt it, what I meant is that even for that there's no explicit consent in the way they are doing with the Apps on appstore (they probably mix it when you're setting up your account). Because you might have apps that collected even less data then Apple, and they are still subject the user consent message.
I can see from the downvotes that this is not a popular opinion, which is odd - I'm just saying that everyone should play by the same rules, else there's an asymmetry that will favor the ones who can circumvent this limitation, which in this case, it's Apple.
It's just not coherent, since it's not about collecting a lot, or very little data, it's about users giving explicit consent to share data.
Apple's apps have never done what the App Tracking policy stops App developers from doing. To be clear, this new policy is not about apps tracking their own customers—that's always going to happen. This policy is designed to stop companies like Facebook from tracking your activity across multiple apps on your device.
> you might have apps that collected even less data then Apple, and they are still subject the user consent message.
The consent requirement has got nothing to do with how much data they're collecting about you, rather with what they're doing with the data that has been collected.
> I can see from the downvotes that this is not a popular opinion
The downvotes are not because your opinion is unpopular, it's because your opinion is grounded in the aforementioned misunderstandings.
They do. And it has been opt in for much longer than this new change.
You give consent to share data with a company when you share it with that company. This straightforward relationship isn't an issue so long as the company's use of your data is in line with your expectations.
When you want to know what a company's incentives are, look at their financials. Money is the great truth teller. Does Apple have sources of revenue which rely upon use of customers' private data? I'm not aware of any.
Now ask the opposite question. Does Apple have a financial incentive to be a good steward of their customers' data? This is a very clear yes, as evidenced by their highlighting of privacy as a distinguishing feature. While it's stupid to trust a company's marketing, it's important to appreciate that Apple have wilfully staked a large part of their reputation on customer privacy. That would have been a monumentally stupid move if they weren't intending to live up to it.
> they put Apple first above everything else
A weird accusation. Setting aside immutable truths about the motivations of any corporation, Apple has famously placed their customers ahead of many other external concerns. Case in point—where they have actively defied the wishes of the FBI (and similar arms of many world governments) in the implementation of robust on-device encryption and cryptographic security.
> I only see them getting an exclusive view of user behavior on their devices.
Yes, and? Tell me, who are these other people that should have access to my data? Damn right it should be exclusive to Apple—people are paying them good money to be a trustworthy steward of their data.
There’s some concern about how Apple is changing the economics of free apps. I personally have always had a problem with free apps destroying the opportunity for those that charge the user cash instead of data.
My personal story is:
- Initial position 12 years ago: Apple is a closed company and they fight open standards. I don't like them
- Jump head-first into Android starting with the G1 (aka HTC Dream in Canada)
- Get worn down by the constant race to the bottom and by finding out how the sausage is made
- Get an iPhone, which is not my phone of choice, to move away from the data harvesting economy
So for me the entire reason I swapped my Android for an iPhone is to avoid the ad machine.
This will definitely sound tone-deaf, but if you want to trade your attention for apps, you are free to make the same trip in reverse to Googleland ;)
People are more than willing to pay for streaming content that they actually value, though.
If you give people the option to pay for, say, Doge memes, and they don't pay for them, that doesn't mean that they aren't willing to pay for anything, it just means that Doge memes have little to no value.
Not at all. Facebook can simply require you to enable tracking in order to use Facebook.
Keep in mind "app tracking" here means reading your device ID, called the 'Identity For Advertisers' (IDFA for short). They do this so that they can cross reference that IDFA with data that other apps have collected on that same IDFA, allowing them to connect the dots that it's the same user.
This app tracking transparency feature makes it so that they can't access your IDFA, and can only show you ads based on info you provide within their own app, not from the other apps you use. It keeps your data silo-ed to each app.
Seems Facebook could nonetheless offer two tiers of service for those with and those without tracking.
Although a bit orthogonal, Instagram will not let me post from a Desktop browser but will from a Mobile browser. (So I switch my User Agent to a phone on the Desktop when I navigate to Instagram and wish to post.)
The game is not free, it just collects the payments through the candy shop. The offsetting of the payment includes you stop playing and looking at candy images and initiating the process itself requires us writing off our privacy so that the candy image guys can try to guess which candy we might like more.
What if everything is paid directly? Yes, there's Apple's %30 cut but there's also Google's cut and Facebook's cut in advertisement(which is not transparent and I hear that it's about %50).
Besides, huge resources are spent in running the system that tries to guess who would prefer to buy what. It comes at the cost of computational and human resources too, not just the privacy. That cost must be incorporated to the product price.
Is finding the product you look for through WOM, lists and publications that inefficient? Is it really impossible to find your customers organically? Do we really need the customer/product matching in exchange of money?
Do we really need an incredibly inefficient centralised communist system(the big agencies like FB) where the party members(the technicians in these companies) need to track everyone(the spying required to make the system possible) so that we can have free games and apps(which are not free but paid from the communal money that the central organisation collects from you)?
In general, neither Google nor FB take a "cut" in the traditional sense from their advertising. What (normally) happens is that advertiser bids their "true value" (i.e expected LTV), and a second price auction is run. In this kind of auction, the winner pays the price that the runner-up was willing to spend.
This differs massively from the pre-internet ad business (radio, tv, print etc), in that they would normally quote $X, but up to $X/10 was the minimum price, but the rest was built in as margin for people further up the chain (sales, agency etc).
One of the big problems that the ad agencies are having now is that their business model relied on arbitraging the price of the client vs the cost of the service, and this doesn't work for Google or Facebook.
That being said, both Goog and FB make insane amounts of money, but that's because the ads are essentially free to deliver (in fact, the users pay to render the ads themselves), and they have huge amounts of users to serve ads to.
Citation needed. Somehow there was an app economy before the rise of massive data aggregation.
It's going to slightly impact the people profiting from the mass surveillance economy until they figure out how to get around it. This does nothing to impact the vast input feeds of location and traffic data from mobile carriers and ISPs, transaction data from purchases, etc. It basically forces those wanting to market to customers using Apple devices to remove the cameras from their customers' bathrooms and figure out another way to discover they are out of toilet paper. The pissing and moaning is because the industry basically was able to use the laziest possible implementation to get this information, now they will have to do a little more work.
More generally, it's gonna make FB and GOOG less useful for small, niche businesses. The big players will be fine, but lots of smaller businesses are likely to do less well.
Maybe the big players will do something to make cohorted ads work, but it will be less efficient and will lead to lots of small businesses having much more difficulty getting their products in front of the right people.
I'm not sure why. Either maybe they don't know that there's a way to change settings, or maybe they're too afraid they'll break something, I don't know.
I try to show people where settings are in different apps and opperating systems and encourage them to explore the options, but it seems like they never do.
I think most people are just conditioned to live with the way things are. Some people will try to search for a solution online, but that's an extreme minority in my opinion. It seems like most people will suffer silently, and some others might complain, but they still won't do anything to fix it - just complain.
There’s probably some ptsd from seeing a geek squad van pulling up out front for a lot of households.
1. It might not be obvious that changing a setting could improve things. You need to have a solid mental model of how the specific tech works and how the setting could influence things. Casual users don't really have a model. Well, everyone has one, but for casual users it's more like a half-drawn sketch.
1. Changing a setting might break something - sometimes for good. Worse, it could break something unrelated (at least unrelated for the casual observer). Worst case scenario, it breaks something in a subtle way, that you only notice after a long time.
2. Changing a setting might break something that you can't fix on your own. Which takes us to a crucial social aspect: nobody like to feel dumb. Asking for help in many cultures and for many individuals makes them feel dumb.
Got a new laptop, it has a "high performance" nvidia GPU as well as the integrated AMD one. I was getting notifications that regular apps were using the wrong GPU and wasting battery, and I should use an option from the manufacturer to disable it. Once I eventually figured out that you needed to kill all such apps before enabling it does anything, everything seems fine, until weeks later I realise sleep isn't working.
Took a detour investigating "modern standby", which is Microsoft's new sleep mode that doesn't turn off the CPU and so was suspicious. But after messing around trying to force classic S3 sleep, messing with the powercfg command (which reported sleep as normal, wake on keypress, no wake timers, etc.), and testing with all apps closed, no change.
On the verge of giving up and assuming this was just the nature of modern standby, I booted a Ubuntu live USB, hit sleep, and saw all the usual pulsing LEDs. That reminded me of seeing the same thing when I used the laptop for the very first time, so I had enough confidence to "refresh Windows" (a reinstall that keeps files).
After doing so, I hit sleep, it worked fine, then had to gradually reconfigure the laptop, hitting sleep every time until it broke, which of course was just after I started feeling brave enough to make multiple changes every time. Narrowed it down to the GPU setting and all working fine after changing it back, but I'm going to be very selective about what I change and install for a while now.
I think most people who enabled the setting (as prompted!) would just be living with the battery drain though.
That's where the trouble will come. I can see trend emerge where essential functionality could be blocked on account of tracking being disabled. I have some faith policies and people will work against this but i've seen so many dark patterns in freemium that I think this sort of dishonesty could just work.
Tracked ads have more value because it's more likely that you'll buy something targeted at you. So you need to show less ads compared to untracked ads to extract the same value.
I think that this kind of differentiation is allowed by Apple and probably will be implemented in some apps.
But Facebook and other popular apps are nagging you to switch it on, so it's still an interesting statistic.
Edit: Never mind. I found it under Settings/Privacy/Tracking: "Allow Apps to Request to Track". I might flip it on just to see what nags me about allowing tracking.
That said I am very impressed that they turn off apps access to the UUID for the device by default. Bless them. There is more money to be made, I would have thought, by going down the well trodden path of avarice, duplicity, and self deception that Google has trodden. Well done Apple.
(Perhaps I am wrong and there is some nefarious plan for world domination behind their moves - just because I cannot see it does not mean it is not there!)
I'm sure I'm not the only one. I'm relatively technical and I thought until now that you had to do in on a per-app basis.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/12/noisy-poll-results-and...
So that 4% is basically meaningless, indistinguishable from 0%, it might represent misunderstanding, misclicks and the like.
There is a variety of reasons one may click "Yes".
The number is certainly almost zero. Hence the Facebook/Google shit-fit about all of this.
1. Intercept DNS requests to filter out requests to certain domains
2. Provide an ad and tracking blocking VPN service.
Both of these approaches can work device-wide and do not require root access to your device.
Blokada: https://blokada.org/ AdGuard: https://adguard.com/en/adguard-android/overview.html
BTW I'm listing these apps as examples but I don't know them well enough to specifically recommend either of them.
Does it mean that if the users don't know about this option in the settings they will never be prompted to allow tracking, and just implicitly disallow it? If that's the case, the prompt is just transparency theater, Apple has already made the decision; and it's hard not to notice the conflict of interest.
[throwaway because I work in the industry, but not in ads]
Tracking Apple requires app developers to ask for permission before they track you or your device across apps or websites they don’t own in order to target advertising to you, measure your actions due to advertising, or to share your information with data brokers. If you give your permission to be tracked, the app can allow information about you or your device collected through the app (for example, a user or device ID, your device's current advertising identifier, your name, email address, or other identifying data provided by you) to be combined with information about you or your device collected by third parties. The combined information can then be used by the app developer or third parties for purposes of targeted advertising or advertising measurement. The app developer may also choose to share the information with data brokers, which may result in the linking of publicly available and other information about you or your device. When you decline to give permission for the app to track you, the app is prevented from accessing your device's advertising identifier (previously controlled through the Limit Ad Tracking setting on your device). App developers are responsible for ensuring they comply with your choices. In some circumstances, the app developer is not required by Apple to ask for your permission. The app developer may combine information about you or your device for targeted advertising or advertising measurement purposes without your permission if the developer is doing so solely on your device and not sending the information off your device in a way that identifies you. In addition, the app developer may share information about you or your device with data brokers without your permission for fraud detection or prevention or security purposes. However, the data broker must be performing the fraud detection or prevention or security services only on behalf of the app developer, which means the data broker cannot use the information about you or your device for any other purposes. You can control whether apps can ask for permission to track you. If you don't want to be asked for your permission by each app that wants to track you, you can disable Allow Apps to Ask to Track. On iOS and iPadOS, go to Settings > Privacy > Tracking. On tvOS, go to Settings > General > Privacy > Tracking. When you disable Allow Apps to Ask to Track, any app that attempts to ask for your permission will be blocked from asking and automatically informed that you have requested not to be tracked. If you previously gave apps permission to track, you can tell those apps to stop tracking you at the same time you disable Allow Apps to Ask to Track. You can also control the tracking permission on a per-app basis. On iOS or iPadOS, go to Settings, tap an app, then tap to turn off Allow Tracking, or go to Settings > Privacy > Tracking and tap to turn on or off each app displayed in the list of apps that have requested permission to track you. On tvOS, go to Settings > General > Privacy > Tracking and select the app in the list below Tracking.
If that's anything to go by, Apple will ship a shitty half-baked version of it and then take years to figure out a way to finally make it good without compromising user privacy.
Adtech is basically highly-paid people sniffing your underwear trying to figure out what you had for breakfast. And they get all indignant when you say "hey cut it out, that's kind of weird."
>"The (body image scanning) technology is sent to the airports without the ability to save, transmit or print the images," said Greg Soule, TSA spokesman, in an interview with CBSNews.com. "At airports, the images are examined by a security officer in a remote location, and, once the image is cleared, they're deleted."
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/naked-body-scan-images-never-sa...
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2010/11/100_images_from_the_...
And an alleged insider discussion of how those "remote" viewers respect passenger privacy:
"Personally, in the I.O. room, I witnessed light sexual play among officers, a lot of e-cigarette vaping, and a whole lot of officers laughing and clowning in regard to some of your nude images, dear passengers."
https://takingsenseaway.wordpress.com/2012/12/19/letter-from...
> the images are examined by a security officer in a remote location
oh dear.
More seriously, at least TSA can at least make a proportionality type of argument, along the lines of, this invasion of privacy is justified on the grounds that it might save lives.
Adtech is just going to use it to try and figure out how to convince me to buy a motorized turnip twaddler.
I have the right to simultaneously hate and be disgusted by the TSA yet hate and be disgusted by advertisers and ad tech even more.
https://www.latimes.com/nation/nationnow/la-na-tsa-screeners...
Versus, even if we give adtech a similar benefit of the doubt, and accept for the sake of argument that they really could more effectively convince me to buy the world's greatest fidget cube, there's still just no way that such an outcome is a great enough social good to justify the means they used to achieve it.
(Except perhaps from the perspective of the adtech and fidget cube people. And, even then, only if we assume that they have a slightly deranged opinion of the social utility of their fidget toy relative to all other fidget toys. Or that they're solipsists.)
In the above scenario, I'm not sure that I see a violation of privacy, but I suspect you would. If you could enlighten me as to why, that would be super helpful.
There's also the security question. Data breaches are real and happen all the time. I think that the crackers' perspective on this subject may be, if I may misappropriate the famous IRA statement, "remember we only have to be lucky once. You will have to be lucky always."
In short, the mere existence of these pools of data is a threat, not only to people's privacy, but to their personal security. Even when you can't demonstrate that a specific harm has occurred yet. It's like hazardous waste: given enough time, it will leak out and cause damage.
OTOH, ads pay for a lot of stuff, so if you could delete the raw data after some short time, and only retain the model which was used for serving/prediction, then I think a lot of those concerns go away, and the whole infrastructure around data is made an awful lot safer.
Lots of your other points only really apply to the US (the cavalier attitude towards data and privacy, especially), so I wonder if this is something that would work better in the EU, because you do have much stricter laws around the use of personal data.
Perhaps from the machine, but what prevents a TSA viewer in the remote location from snapping an image of the screen with their smartphone, or wearing an always-on logging camera to the workstation?
This has to be a GDPR violation, I certainly didn’t give consent for them to email me, but people are still doing this kind of thing apparently.
I have to say that whole outlook isn’t as good as gmail, all the things evolving spam is super easy to handle with policies. I still have my old gmail address forwarding things that google would sort into “this is the relevant mails” part of its new inbox system, and 90% of it goes directly into my “unwanted stuff” or clutter or whatever it’s called in outlook.
As a benefit it also gave me a TB of storage and in browser office, and while I don’t use the office stuff much, I do use one drive to backup my photos because iCloud storage frankly is almost as expensive as the entire office365 account.
There are providers that directly exploit their graph by selling the PII within it, such as GetEmails[2] (and the publishers they source data from). But Google isn't one of them.
[1] https://developers.google.com/ads-data-hub
[2] https://martech.zone/getemails-identify-anonymous-visitors/
Sure, not as finely-tuned, but that's not the user's problem.
I'd be happy to pay a few pennies or dimes for every article I open to skim or read. But I cannot and will not pay the 2-3 figure subscriptions demanded by every publisher.
There is a range of choice, all too high to commit to one, so the only one that gets my money is the Guardian, with a donate-what-you can model. The rest I put up with generally avoiding them, and reading only a few per month before the paywall goes up.
If micropayments don't work, I'd also happily pay a single subscription in the $hundreds/year for access to around a dozen of the publications, but no one offers that to my knowledge (if anyone knows of such a service, please post!)
But to blame the users when they clearly state their preferences at the first opportunity, and the industry has failed for decades to provide such an opportunity.. nope.
Try Duckduckgo.com?
Expect prices of apps to go up.
Expect more competition and higher standards as this artificial funding model is removed.
The systemic advantage is simple, it's having a good product, eg. Search for Google or a complete portal ( Amazon, Facebook).
What got easier?
You'll see who's a freeloader ;)
Wait! They actually do. Apple allows targeting ads in the App Store by things that require data collection.
So, a better answer might be “not right now” because no one is forcing it to play by its own rules.
AFAIK Apple's ad targeting is largely based on self-reported stuff like demographic information and what you're subscribed to in Apple News or Music. It's not doing the kind of massive log-ingestion and cross-site tracking to do psychographic profiling that people tend to find most problematic.
You can have services No intrusive tracking You can have all the joooooooy
G.D.P.R.
Also why not a law for full transparency? You can have all your freedom you want just be transparent about all the tracking and information selling or sharing that is happening. Can't you convince the free loving americans that a simpler GDPR that only requires full transparency is "very capitalistic"?
I'd much prefer the Apple solution which allows for a company to be _rewarded_ for taking a voluntary stance (a positive one!) on tracking, instead of coercing every business to follow a government mandated rule on something as relatively minor as advertising.
What Apple is doing is also a recent thing, so before this fancy privacy labels the market had no solution.
Let me know all the downsides to a transparency law and for each downside specify who is affected by the transparency.
Most people seem to welcome more relevant advertisments, and a significant number of people in my social circle - even in Ukraine - like to purchase products directly from Instagram advertisments.
If you can't make money from advertising, and paid apps have an enormous 15-30% commission, how exactly does anyone except Apple make money from mobile apps?
Adtech often touts "relevant ads." But I think that's a red herring. I'm a fan of The Simpsons. That doesn't mean I want ads for Simpsons stuff following me from site to site. I'd probably get annoyed if I get Simpsons ads on a serious financial website. What's more important is that the ads are relevant to the context of the site they're displayed in. And that requires no tracking or personalization. It does, however, require human understanding and communication skills, not tech or data. People like ads if they're well-crafted and convey a compelling message in context.
Everyone knows what Coca-Cola is. But Coke still heavily advertises worldwide. It's not to make people thirsty when they see the ad. It's to make thirsty people think "Huh, a Coke would be quite nice right now" when they're at the store.
If these ads business models become significantly less profitable, then it becomes more difficult to provide free apps to everyone.
> If you can't make money from advertising
You charge for the app. If the value your users put on your app is $0, then shut it down and try again. It's like any other business.
Of these, Amazon also serves ads. Opening the app, three items on the home page are marked sponsored. One for some k-cup coffee pod product, one for dog food, and one for cat food. These are clearly targeted (I have bought cat food and coffee very recently from Amazon and Whole Foods). But to be perfectly honest, I'm fairly comfortable with a company I buy stuff from keeping a record and making suggestions based on it through their own storefront. That's just good customer relations. I'm not comfortable with my activity being tracked everywhere across all applications I ever interact with to create a grand unified profile of all my synthesized purchasing, viewing, reading, and searching habits that can be sold to all advertisers advertising anywhere. That's a panopticon.