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> I challenge the blowhards here to like, name one substantive harm someone has experienced from ad ID tracking on an iPhone

The sense of entitlement from those on the other side of the ads business, and their disdain for what users might want or how they feel, shows exactly why this business and industry is broken. And frankly why the whole thing is being dragged down right now. Figure it out. Adapt. It's what every other business has to do all the time.

You didn’t answer his question, you just stated your own opinion.

It was a question in bad faith. The central issue is the power asymmetry, whereas we don’t know when we’re tracked, by whom, or how our information is correlated.

> Figure it out. Adapt.

I understand this is a stylized opinion.

There is actually a great deal of innovation in advertising! I don't think the ad ID tracking is going to, on net, matter. For example, Fortnite already has unavoidable branded advertising that doesn't require tracking at all to work. Native ads can't be blocked by uBlock.

The big forces at play move around where advertising goes, but it doesn't really get rid of it or necessarily make it "better". Probably we should not allow advertising to kids, and yet here we are, Roblox and Fortnite branded experiences primarily for very young children! Thanks Obama.

> disdain

I don't know, I only have a jokey disdain for the end user. People have rehashed these arguments a million times. You can't just righteous your way into being right here. I would just say you didn't name any harms, and then you went and blew very hard.

> This is in a sense totally factual, and I challenge the blowhards here to like, name one substantive harm someone has experienced from ad ID tracking on an iPhone.

You then give a perfect example right in the next paragraph:

> so that Johnny Programmer, watching YouTube videos on a weekend, would see a demo of his devops tool because Johnny searched "how to connect git to kubernetes" or whatever in the previous 10 days.

So now Johnny Programmer's work life is hounding him on weekends. Even worse, he is being influenced to buy a paid product to do something that could probably be easily achieved with open source tools as well.

To be fair, you should use different profiles for your work and personal digital lives.

And if someone is likely to use an open source solution, they’re also unlikely to be influenced to switch to a paid product based on an ad instead.

Advertising is actively working against this - trying to find ways to correlate your activity across as many devices and accounts as possible. Especially now that work from home, BYOD and ZeroTrust (which reduces the need for corporate VPNs) are all blurring the lines and giving new opportunities for correlation.

> And if someone is likely to use an open source solution, they’re also unlikely to be influenced to switch to a paid product based on an ad instead.

This is assuming that the ad isn't promising something too good to be true, or using deceptive pricing to make it seem cheap enough to be better than the OSS, or using psychological tricks to try to override your rational choice (which may not work for this particular example, but may well work for many others).

> To be fair, you should use different profiles for your work and personal digital lives.

Isn’t that victim blaming?

I mean, I don’t like it either and I’d rather we didn’t have to take personal measures against this stuff.

But I still use a password manager to protect myself online. I also use different profiles to split my work and home digital lives.

Why should I have to use a different "profile"?

If you make the example abstract you might understand what the problem is.

>I challenge the blowhards here to like, name one substantive harm someone has experienced from ad ID tracking on an iPhone.

How quickly we forget/forgot this proof of concept:

http://ghostinfluence.com/the-ultimate-retaliation-pranking-...

So the harm is being able to send a message to someone? Messaging apps are not harmful and are some of the most popular apps that exist.

> This is in a sense totally factual, and I challenge the blowhards here to like, name one substantive harm someone has experienced from ad ID tracking on an iPhone.

Things don't have to cause obvious harm to still be inappropriate.

It's all tradeoffs at the end of the day. A better entertained, better informed public - enjoying their free IP paid by better ads - is worth the some-abstract-not-yet harms.

That said I believe journalists are definitely getting fucked by the government, Google, Meta and even Apple, with the shit payouts of Apple News being unsustainable too. You misunderstand me, these giant corporations are definitely the antagonist.

It's just not necessarily most advertisers, who just want to get you to buy shoes or whatever the fuck. Nobody forces you to buy anything. But someone has to feed the journalists.

Blendle is a good example of how to feed journalists without having to tolerate ads.

I would preferred the government regulation apparatus to be brought to bear against harms, both demonstrated and imminently likely, rather than mere inconvenience or "inappropriateness".

> This is in a sense totally factual, and I challenge the blowhards here to like, name one substantive harm someone has experienced from ad ID tracking on an iPhone

Building up a huge library of data about you in an unregulated fashion has never backfired on the public at large, oh wait those exact data warehouses have been continuous sources of pain for users.

The reality is these breaches cost the business next to nothing. After all even if millions of users have <$100 worth of damages it is impossible to recover that. So the business did hundreds of millions of damages at no cost to itself.

And what if you search for 'weird fetish' and those kinds of ads start popping up when you show a youtube video as part of presentation.

People do not want to be tracked and then bombarded with the cloud's idea of who they are (right or wrong), they want to be in control.

Everyone is all gangster about privacy and their hatred for ads until they realize they need to pay for the services they use.

Do you think all the uBlock origin and other "anti ad/pro privacy" folks really pay for, say, Youtube to remove ads when they use it. Of course not. Talk is cheap

One absolute non starter is paying for any service which tracks and advertises anyway.

I'm pro-privacy and anti-ad, and I block all ads on my home network. I have a YouTube Premium subscription. I also pay for Fastmail and Kagi. So I don't think that; I know that.

> Well, I guess e-mail them some more.

That will definitely work

One bad substantive harm from ad id tracking on iOS?

Making zuck and google richer.

Yes, but Zuck and Google get richer because companies are paying them for a valuable service. It's unclear that destroying that value helps anyone

I can think of a few hundred people on Kaua'i that would be helped if Zuck fucked right off.

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