But the fact that a company can do this to another company at the flick of a switch by changing the rules of the game on a whim is still kind of scary, even if I think it's for the better in this instance.
Not saying Apple is a saint, however it’s not that Apple changed the rules they provide options that weren’t available before (and imho should have been available already for years).
Like, I could accept these changes if they applied to Apple too, but they don't, so the privacy stuff is a smokescreen for moves designed to keep their services revenue growing, and their stock price heading up and to the right.
I don't necessarily believe Apple are being deliberately adversarial here. Perhaps I'm being overly naive, but to me Facebook's woes are a side-effect, not the primary aim. Apple's change is to improve privacy for their paying customers, and if Facebook (or anyone else) relies on invading that privacy to make money ... tough. The window has closed. Time to figure out an alternative.
I briefly started a service. It was an automated tool to track how your tweets affected followers and traffic to one or more sites. It was neat.
Then Twitter changed the auth API. A month later, the throttles changed. Then something else changed in the JSON objects the API returned.
We decided to give up when Twitter announced their own analytics tool, after about two months or part-time work.
So yes, companies can and do that routinely. Sometimes, as it seems to be the case here, they are just acting in their (and their customers) best interest and completely ignoring the effects on other companies.
You've got it back to front. If one company is $10b dependent upon another company not having the option to disable privacy invasion, then that company has chosen to build their castle in a swamp. It deserves to sink by $10b.
They did not flick the switch, the users did. They merely pointed out the existence of the switch.
Facebook built their empire on browsers being super super permissive about tracking. Critically, this tracking was (a) something most users weren't aware was happening and (b) something that was very very possible to curtail, because it wasn't something Facebook controlled.
People started noticing, and they didn't like it. Browser makers and platform makers moved to make these unhappy people happier. Facebook got caught out, because their whole business is built on this invasive tracking.
I am 100% untroubled by the way this is playing out. It's not a general case problem. It's very specific to Facebook's dependence on an accidental aspect of the web that, when explained, most people are horrified by -- and that was fairly easy to rework.
In this instance, the flick of the switch added a prompt asking users whether they want to opt in/consent to Facebook tracking their activities on other apps.
If Facebook is truly taking that much of a hit from that, it tells you how many users opted out. If their advertising model only succeeds by tracking users without their explicit consent, then their model is a failure.
Cf: all those people who depend on a google project to survive.
This is the same, but at scale.
It's all bullshit, and marketing. Apple is doing this to grow apple ads. That's it.
Obviously the the ideal would be to have neither.
I would argue that it would be far worse for humanity if they decided that they did not have to follow local laws. Regardless of what you might think of our laws here, I do not want a foreign company feeling entitled to ignore them and impose their American views. They do it far too often as it is already.
If you want Apple to provide better privacy, change your laws and make sure they are followed.
In the meantime, until Apple is found to have violated local data protection laws, the whole “but China” argument is a red herring.
See https://www.apple.com/legal/privacy/data/en/apple-advertisin... for the details.
Want to opt out of this? It's a OS-level setting in an obscure place, rather than what Apple requires from 3p apps.
Now, Apple isn't uniquely bad in the level of tracking they do. They're just the same as all of these companies are. The place where they are unique is the incredibly brazen self-dealing, using their control of iOS to boost their own tracking ad business over the competitors.
Citation? I'm not saying your wrong, but I haven't heard anyone make this claim before.
> rather than what Apple requires from 3p apps
For the sake of argument, even if we assume your prior claim is correct, this is still incorrect. Apple does not require third party apps to notify users or provide an opt-out mechanism from tracking user activity across the apps of a singular developer.
> We create segments, which are groups of people who share similar characteristics, and use these groups for delivering targeted ads.
> We may use information such as the following to assign you to segments:
> ... The music, movies, books, TV shows, and apps you download ...
> ... The topics and categories of the stories you read and the publications you follow, subscribe to, or enable notifications from ...
> ... Your name, address, age, gender, ...
> ... your App Store searches and browsing activity ...
> ... information stored on your device, such as the apps you frequently open ...
There is absolutely no suggestion there that these segments would be per-app. In fact, they cannot be per-app given some of the data they say they're using is only collected from places with no ads. That is not an exhaustive list by the way, but just representative examples provided by Apple. The only data they explicitly promise not to use for ads targeting is:
> No Apple Pay transactions or Health app data is accessible to Apple’s advertising platform
> But the fact that a company can do this to another company at the flick of a switch by changing the rules of the game on a whim is still kind of scary
As a general principle I agree, but this is more a reason to encourage many small businesses over a small number of trillion dollar businesses (other reasons exist for the exact opposite).
But in this specific case, not only do I agree with you that it’s for the better, but I also can’t see how Apple is even going further than just requiring apps on its platform to adhere to GDPR.