Apple’s ad business set to boom on the back of its own anti-tracking crackdown
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The part that is unfair is that no one but Apple gets to have an App Store or process IAPs, which has always been the problem with iOS. Trying to make it about ATT just seems like a red herring.
This nothing to do with advertising.
You can see a lot of the tracking and correlating that apple does within their own legal documents, which I commend them for at least writing them out clearly : https://www.apple.com/legal/privacy/data/en/apple-advertisin...
Apple also uploads a lot of logs, etc from their devices to their servers, and opting out of apple level tracking at some basic level is often just not an option. Ex, they upload battery behavior info and use it to improve the battery perf of their devices, or upload people's locations and other location adjacent data like wifi networks with location services and so on.
Apple cares about privacy from third parties, not privacy from apple itself. Which is very apple of apple. Apple also does not let you turn it off in some key parts. And they know they work with security services & authoritarian governments that force them to hand over any data that they have access to, in secret, which gets thousands of innocent people killed, tortured and jailed every day at their scale. Yet they still collect it.
Key parts of apple doesn't really like the existence of third parties in many ways, and if they could, they would rather have full locked down control, from what I can observe from external actions over the decades.
Any large group of people will of course have different actions and motives, and I do commend part of the company for caring, and funding efforts like lockdown mode and keeping %95 of the company thinking and caring about privacy at some level. But that key %5 that does not basically ruins it for many. The best we can hope for is to slowly change that last %5, although with this Services & Ads push, I feel like that bad part is only going to grow worse.
Long game, a successful Apple ad business creates bad incentives and is likely bad for customers. As evidenced by the AppStore really being a front door for the worst kind of skinner-box gaming, Apple will choose cash over any overriding principle.
Think of this: 1.Fb shows an ad for angry birds 2. user installs the app 3. user opens the app and makes a ping to fb to tell user with idfa xyz opened the app.
The problem is not that only apple gets (2), but it is that because it gets (2), it thinks it should be able to dictate how (3) happens. Since apple is the only one doing (2), it puts everyone else at a disadvantage.
And since apple doesn't have web ads business, it sees no problem killing that altogether through att as well.
There are policy restrictions that you won't be able to get around which is what att is.
the only way to do cross app tracking in ios without the user opting in and without violating apple policy is via explicitly associating accounts across apps either via oauth or some kind of account linking
Imagine if you are less monetizable user, in theory, app should be able to restrict what you can do in the app. It's a business transaction after all
But apple gets a say in this too.
Also apple uses it's app store moat to restrict tracking on websites too, similarly.
To be fair, so does the GDPR which Apple is subject to
Matching the ad to the user is just more difficult as it requires more in the way of user signups, as opposed to e.g. cookie-based tracking which is more ubiquitous and requires less integration.
As Ben Thompson has been shouting, it's because Apple has a very convenient definition of "tracking".
The premium is just an opt-out of the ads (on the specific app) .... the tracking is where the value will be in the future
If the prior profits were not enough, how much higher do the prices need to be to not do this?
In general I trust the company to make choices about computing experiences, much more so than any other products company. So, I am going to try and hold judgement and see how this pans out.
That said, I'd like the company to get out ahead of these decisions and explain reasoning for these changes.
(Unless they show far too many so people start leaving ... That threshold might be high though; Linux is too cumbersome for almost everyone?)
Because it is fundamentally a public company rooted in capitalism, the company is vulnerable to another type of products organization.
One that is similar to a Purpose Trust and not held captive to polluting their own customer experience to reward uninvolved “capital investors.”
It is almost like the business form of RISC-V. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purpose_trust
If there’s growth in a segment of business that’s moving the needle at a multi-trillion market cap corporation like Apple, there are executives and product managers all over the place hoping to get on board.
It’s insulting to the dev community who drove the success of the app store and arguably iOS in general. No amount of “we love our devs” PR can reconcile this.
Apple built this market to control it completely, you could see it coming from miles away. It seems like the big move nowadays is build your market (i.e. "platform") and you get to be judge, jury and executioner. How did you see something like this playing out? I just don't understand how people still aren't cynical enough to see this kind of thing coming.
This has been the case with every single instance of software repositories (aka app stores). Remember the whole ffmpeg and libav schism that was fueled in part by repo maintainers imposing their dogmatic will? Or more recently Debian and whether to include non-free code in its installers (aka local repository)? I can't quite grasp why this doesn't appear immediately obvious to anyone.
The only truly free ecosystem is something like Win32, where developers are free to write whatever they want, publishers are free to sell whatever they want where- and however they want, and the operating system is dependent on that free ecosystem for continued relevance.
In fact, you've done a very good job of highlighting the problem with the iPhone. MacOS' software distribution works because it offers a distribution-agnostic API for native apps, same as Windows. iOS/iPadOS don't expose those interfaces to the user, which means the only way to 'install' an app is with Apple's good graces. Compared to Debian, where you can still install non-free packages regardless of how it exists in the repo, Apple's status quo is considerably more restrictive (and abusive).
Tangentially, I think the tech community needs to be prepared to examine its assumptions about how much control large companies should have over their platforms as they start to resemble utilities. We can’t keep pretending that a duopoly represents real market choice.
Apple has always been just as cutthroat of a business as anyone else, albeit with a different model (hardware) and better branding/PR.
But see how much difference the hardware model makes when the market's down for a bit and Apple needs to juice revenue...
I don't either, but if that's the decision, then where do people come off thinking that they're owed something for participating in a market that they never had a controlling share of in the first place? That's what I don't get. I don't judge people for wanting to put food on the table, but don't act like you're then owed goodwill or whatever for making the rich people richer if that's the way you truly see it. You're supporting capitalism upfront and expecting some sort of vague socialism on the back end. How many times are people gonna get disappointed before they realize that big corporations don't care about them and never have?
It's not like realization is a magic reality bending power however. You can both (a) realize big incumbents are not fair and (b) still have no choice but to go them if you want to make money from your app.
For a practical example, see what LinkedIn did a few years back... I trust nobody, and am largely disinclined to install any/most applications.
You meant the Intro app I suppose,
https://threatpost.com/linkedin-intro-app-equivalent-to-man-...
I don't love Ads based rev stream, but Apple needs some revenue source for the AppStore. Currently the 30% of virtual goods payments is getting a lot of scrutiny. They have already started to reduce it to 15% in many cases. It just makes sense that this will get reduced to 3% over time.
Apple is pivoting to Ads so that they can reduce the % without much of an impact to their top and bottom line.
If they don't do it, someone else will, and they ultimately don't trust third parties with their customers' data (also being a massive corporation, they don't like other companies generating revenue off the backs of their customers).
If you believe Apple is genuine about their commitment to privacy, this should be encouraging news. If you don't believe that, then this does appear to be questionable at best (boxing out third parties so they can profit off the data themselves)
Yeah, if that were true it'd be pretty bad. (It's not true.)
Apple doesn't stop anyone from running ads. They stop companies from collecting and aggregating data across multiple apps without explicit user consent.
It's a smart business decision. Basically "If you want to have deep tracking on users using iPhones, you need to go through us".
It's also a matter of how well the data is anonymized. Given they've gone through the trouble of adding private email proxy features, secure web proxy features, and lockdown mode, I don't think it's lip service, but that's just my opinion.
https://www.apple.com/privacy/docs/Differential_Privacy_Over...
So I would most certainly not choose a phone that spies on me over one that has ads. I already have a phone that has ads. Sure I want less ads but not at the expense of less privacy.
In fact arguably, the less privacy you have the more ads you'll get since they'll have more data to target you.
Collecting data about people is already an infringement of privacy in itself.
It doesn't matter here if you keep that data out of the hands of yet other people.
What Apple basically did was say "tracking users for ads is great, and we realized we don't have to share this data with other ad companies, so good for us."
Apple can collect device data for technical purposes, which is borderline, but more acceptable.
> We build products that we want for ourselves, too, and we just don't want ads.
A lot of developers who value "open-source" still use iOS and macOS. A big reason is because, despite being proprietary, this software is good. The minor flaws (macOS harder to modify, iOS being locked-down, both platforms being not open-source and less compatible with open-source than Linux/BSD) don't outweigh the work of creating a new OS which has the benefits (seamless user experience, fast, good design, efficient for productivity). A big reason PinePhone and LibrePhone are far behind iOS is simply because there isn't enough motivation - the hardware is there, it's the software (e.g. smooth gestures) which are lacking.
Apple would not lose much of their userbase, as a minority of "non-developer" people don't care about invasive ads. But a lot of developers do, and having developers move away is still really bad because it affects Apple's ecosystem. Devs don't just use iOS and macOS, they make software for these platforms and even directly contribute to open-source Apple code. If everyone is making software and fixing bugs for Linux and LineageOS instead, they will get better and cause more developers and eventually ordinary users to migrate away.
Reference: Leith, D. J. (2021). Mobile Handset Privacy: Measuring The Data iOS and Android Send to Apple And Google. URL: https://www.scss.tcd.ie/doug.leith/apple_google.pdf
It is a nuanced, yet extremely important distinction.
Lack of ads IS the killer feature for me. What I use an iPhone for could just as easily be done by Android.
If Apple is enthusiastically running towards the ads hellscape then it might be time to get one of those Linux phones and start developing some apps for it. I need less than 10 apps for it to be a viable replacement, or if it get's really bad then I could make do with even less.
And speculating - wouldn't surprise me too much that Apple is actually weak there. Apple's approach to privacy seems to be mainly "we just don't get your data on our servers", which could be resulting them in ignoring how to build an actual robust privacy program on their side for other things.
You obviously could back this hearsay up with actual evidence I assume?
Like, sure it is hearsay, but what do you want from the guy? Most of us are sharing anecdotes that we hope we be helpful to other HNers, most of the time. If anything, I think a lot of people look to the experience of other users here as the advantage.
If I tell you that while working at unnamed multi-national finance company we wrote software used for what I would consider incredibly immoral, but not illegal (in the US) purposes, I don't have any right to be believed, but I also expect most people would believe me, because they know how these things go in real life, oftentimes in their own organizations.
The only time these rules might be able to be 'broken' is to get data to fix bugs with the person's consent.
Even though it might not be intentional, Apple is lagging at such tooling.
I would imagine AWS and Microsoft also have a thorough tooling solution.
Apple might have a handful of employees misuse data. Google will do it on purpose, at scale.
Every blogger with an axe to grind has been re-spinning this same point with more and more hyperbole since because "Apple bad" = click click click click.
Nothing new to see here.
I suppose the one up-side to the situation is that there's not much point in even trying to spend the time figuring out how to root a device, or dealing with egregiously under-performing open smart phone hardware, and it might be possible to save some money going back to a dumb phone.
Going back a decade in terms of functionality is hardly an answer.
I did point out that it is in fact possible to order a cab using a telephone call.
What a disappointment, she likes actually 1 feature - photos, and the rest is subpar experience compared to her old galaxy S10 (almost 4 year old phone). But then she likes my android photos similarly, since I have 10x zoom which is great for kids always running around or for hiking. Its not even first weeks of her use of Apple, she has it few months. I can browse on my samsung S22 ultra random internet without being swarmed with ads and tracking (firefox and ublock origin, something Apple phones will clearly never have).
And all the rest. It has fingerprint sensor for unlocking, instead of ridiculously shitty faceid which doesn't work with masks (she is a doctor so does wear them often). It often doesn't work even without masks, ie non-ideal light conditions like right now (evening and dimmer lights). Comparable S22 is much nicer phone to look at, to hold, to carry, to charge, and to work with.
I regret recommending it to her at this point, I too was convinced by Apple's effective PR. But quality is just not there, the devices are worse, bigger in size with smaller screen, uglier, heavier, software is meh, raw CPU power is useless on its own when device is so limited. I don't believe a zilch of Apple's PR about privacy, as I didn't for the ads and various other PR talk, actions are the only thing that matter.
And after reading this topic, its clear I will continue shopping in Android's non-chinese realm for a very long time. I don't consider my device secure from state actors, and neither is Apple, so we act accordingly. Thus, no added value in Apple devices, just plenty of marketing, similar to say Hermes or Louis Vuitton purses. Nobody believes those are worth 500$ or 5,000$ to manufacture, yet rich people buy them.
If you are ok with using Safari instead of Firefox, that’s something that has been possible since 2015 on iOS [1].
> instead of ridiculously shitty faceid which doesn't work with masks
It does since iOS 15.4 (March 2022 [2]); I use it every day.
> It often doesn't work even without masks, ie non-ideal light conditions like right now (evening and dimmer lights)
Light has nothing to do with this because FaceID works with infrared: I’m able to unlock my iPhone in the dark with no issue at all. You’re probably holding it wrong [3].
> But quality is just not there, the devices are worse, bigger in size with smaller screen, […] heavier
I fail to find an iPhone 13 that’s bigger than your Samsung S22 Ultra. The Pro Max is 0.2mm wider but 2.1mm less tall and 1.2mm thiner (163.3 x 77.9 x 8.9 mm [4] vs. 160.8 x 78.1 x 7.7 mm [5]). It does have a smaller screen-to-size ratio (87.4% vs. 90.2%) and is slightly heavier (240g vs. 228g -- not sure how noticeable this is).
> the devices are worse, […], uglier, […], software is meh
That part is highly subjective. I personally find the S22 Ultra very ugly but that’s an opinion, not a fact.
[1]: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-34173732
[2]: https://www.businessinsider.com/guides/tech/face-id-with-mas...
[3]: https://www.macrumors.com/2017/09/13/how-iphone-x-face-id-wo...
[4]: https://www.gsmarena.com/samsung_galaxy_s22_ultra_5g-11251.p...
[5]: https://www.gsmarena.com/apple_iphone_13_pro_max-11089.php
People will come out of the woodwork with grievances (ex. crypto integrations, politics, etc) but all of that can be turned off and/or ignored and the browsing experience is quite pleasant
This is not a technical but a political problem. People owning (GNU-)Linux-phones (or just caring about the future of mobile computing) should demand from the companies that they do not force everyone into monopolies.
We should strive to make anyone who gets manipulated into changing their behavior based on an ad they saw feel ashamed and stupid for falling for their tricks, and angry at the advertisers for manipulating them.
This sounds great, but:
A) how do you know/can you prove that you've been manipulated?
B) How do we know that we haven't all been manipulated? (After all, millions of people bought into this ecosystem to get away from ads, I think every person who's angry has a case that they've been manipulated)
and C) where is this social movement gonna take place? Social media, the bastion of internet advertising?
The answer is make tech less important in our lives. There's been a pattern going back decades that technology grows in scale and utility and eventually becomes corporatized to that point that it generates more income to work against its users. The answer is to live a lower tech life. Less time on phones and apps and more time in the real world.
Will never happen until we can dispel the notion that human are free agents. People will never give up this believe about themselves. Meanwhile, it's proven to be effective by virtue of it being a trillion dollar industry or something. Same thing with gambling.
- I own a home that routinely needs services. Ads help me find willing businesses.
- I own a car that needs tires. Just yesterday I looked at ads for those selling them.
- I like to buy art for my house. Ads in apps like Etsy pop up things that might interest me.
- Sometimes I look for a new job. Enough said on that one.
Believe it or not ads exist because they perform a useful social function.
But then again, what percentage of ads is the kind you have to actively go and look for?
Whether you see an ad is entirely driven by how much the seller wants to spend to acquire your purchase. Ads give no indication of the actual quality of the service or product. In fact, companies with greater ad spending tend to be lower quality because a portion of your purchase price is going towards the advertisement at the expense of quality.
Do you really not read reviews when shopping, and just type in a search term and see what comes up? I'd be surprised if you didn't, but if you don't you should try using non-commercial speech when making a purchase decision. Level of advertisement is inversely proportional to value, so I think you'll be pleased with the results.
On GrapheneOS[0] (privacy focused AOSP-based mobile OS) you can do that stuff easily while still owning your device/having root, etc (at least according to this video[1] I saw)
Turn personalized ads on or off Go to Settings > Privacy & Security > Apple Advertising, then turn Personalized Ads on or off. Note: Turning off personalized ads limits Apple’s ability to deliver relevant ads to you. It may not reduce the number of ads you receive.
The reason for my no is that if there are ad agencies committed to building a profile of you, that's far to easy for that profile to get sold/stolen by bad actors. For example, if I was a trans man, and I was buying feminine hygiene products, I could be targeted for harassment by a leaked advertising profile.
If there's no money in building profiles it makes it less likely that one will be built, not that it can't. But that's a reasonable tradeoff to me.
If advertisers figure out a way to target ads without profiling, I'm all for it. In fact, it's not that uncommon for me to watch "sponsors" on YouTube. It's targeted because people who are watching a video on mechanical principles, might be interested in.. Say "brilliant".
That said. VPN services and ear pods can gf themselves.
We're seeing that targeted (political) ads are a powerful way to hack a democracy.
If everyone is seeing the same shitty advertisement, at least they have something to complain about together - even that much common ground is better in my opinion than everyone with their own version of reality.
Why should I care about the "efficiency" of the ads I'm being served? It's not my job to help them exploit me.
Advertisements on TV are tolerated because it's not targeted and just a random broadcast to everyone who might be interested.
Anxiety that certain things may be used against you in the form of advertising is a very real problem people face. A teenager who is researching transgender topics would be potentially frightened if the TV station the family usually watches that never shows any ads about transgender health suddenly started pushing those kinds of ads and the parents disapproved.
The problem lies in the tracking technology. In order to make informed decisions about what people might potentially be looking to buy includes learning that individual's preferences and the rather unfortunate part of everything being online is that includes everything you could possibly imagine. Everything from the type of job you have right down to your porn preferences and other proclivities are potentially up for grabs and I'm sure the vast majority of people would feel greatly unnerved if Google, Facebook or whoever showed them just what kind of person the algorithms have determined them to be just by the data they've already collected.
Untargetted ads tend to be big companies promoting their brand.
There is also the concept of identity, and specifically, who owns your identity. If you are the owner of your own identity, including interests, wants and needs, then no company should be allowed to create a profile of your identity ("shadow profile") without your permission. However, the big ad corporations like Google and Facebook (and recently TikTok) all create shadow profiles for you, like it or not, with or without your consent. Why are they allowed to do this? Should I not be paid if my unique identity is being used and monetized?
Making inferences about you doesn't mean you "own" your identity less.
I would consider consenting to being tracked and offered personalized ads if I got paid to see these ads. If I am the owner of my identity, I should be the one monetizing it. Why would I agree some corporation should make money off of my very being? I resent that. Either don't profile me (especially against my will) or compensate me.
Getting paid for your thoughts is not something new. People are constantly being paid to take part in focus groups, AB testing, polls and surveys. So why not pay you for the right to use this information in advertising?
Badgering you for personal information? You are freely choosing to go on their site and interact with it how you want. The comparison with "harassment" seems extremely hyperbolic.
> So why not pay you for the right to use this information in advertising?
You're being compensated by using their free product, which you are free to not use.
Only that the entire effort of collecting your data and profiling you happens without you being able to notice, stop or interfere (unless using some extension or sometimes a specific browser). It's more akin to you visiting public places (the visible websites) while a creepy stalker follows your every move and tries to profile you. This might be a form of harassment, but even if it isn't, I rather avoid this situation.
> You're being compensated by using their free product, which you are free to not use.
You might not be awere of how some of this works then. TikTok can seemingly track users visiting WebMD and Weight Watchers [1]. You can visit the webpage of your church, a clinic or even some municipal authorities and still get shadow profiled. And TikTok is new to this. Imagine the data collected by Google and Facebook.
We're not talking about visiting websites like YouTube where you enjoy a "free product". We're talking about virtually any website you visit including some essential services.
[1] https://www.consumerreports.org/electronics-computers/privac...
The entire point of advertising is manipulating human beings. Targeted advertising means you have even more data specific to an individual making it easier to manipulate the individual. More generic advertising (for example, TV ads) means all you have is the general area they live in, or the general interest of the individual (magazine ads). You cannot manipulate people based on their personal traits anymore.
The focus of the advertising shifts immediately from the consumer of the ad to the product and/or message of the ad, because you simply do not have enough information about the consumer.
The entire point of your comment is manipulating human beings.
Advertising often just seeks to make a consumer aware of a certain product. If that is manipulation, so is pretty much any content that seeks to change what people know.
The difference is in the intention for said manipulation. His comment isn’t trying to get us to part with our hard-earned income for ultimately frivolous goods.
Sure, if the good or service is actually frivolous, but what about the case where the human is actively searching for some good or service that offer some actual value?
Or is the default mode of operation always the consumer losing and the business winning?
As an example, a couple of months ago I was searching for some new summer outfits. Went through Google, Reddit, various clothing blogs, catalogs, etc. but didn't find a lot that I liked. After a week more of targeted ads on Instagram, I was finally able to discover brands that fit my tastes.
Unless I'm buying something well-defined like a TV or Airpods, passive exposure via targeted ads has been one of the best ways for me to find something worth purchasing.
You may want a THING, but you don't know about a particular brand or style of said THING. Just by making you aware of them can be a win win.
Say you've been researching "THINGS" for a couple weeks and narrowed it down to 2 brands. An Ad pops for a brand you'd never heard of. Naturally you check it out, only to find out its better than either of the options you were previously considering.
I'm not arguing we don't need to buy anything ever. I'm arguing most ads are either pushing stuff you don't really need 99% of the time or selling outright junk. And let's not get into how close some ads are to plainly false advertising (I'm looking at you, wellness / nutrition)
Question. If your ads were perfectly targeted in that 100% of advertised products were something that you're interested in, is that not ideal? Isn't that what companies like Google and Facebook are trying to do? Wouldn't you be happier if you didn't get the Wellness / Nutrition / Viagra ads?
It wants to get me to buy. Any stated aim less than this is a waste of their money.
His comment is trying to manipulate the reader into believing something that he believes is better for mankind. He doesn't materially benefit, and the reader doesn't lose anything.
Ads and advertisers are not trying to manipulate the viewers into buying a product. They are manipulating viewers into becoming the type of person that buys products impulsively and with little research. The product of the advertiser is not an ad; the product of the advertiser is you. This is not to your benefit.
So, trying to reduce gp's comment and ads in general to equivalence is misguided imo.
As a shoemaker, you might think your shoe is the best shoe on the market. Google doesn't care which is the best shoe. Google simply sells a product, namely, a credulous audience, to the shoemakers, who want buyers. And their ecosystem is bent toward improving that product. The shoemakers' noble ends don't justify the evil means of the advertisers.
This is kinda what I take the old adage to mean, "If you're not paying for the product, you are the product." You might think that Youtube, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, etc. are free services because they don't cost you money. But that's like saying that a stay at the butcher's is free for the cow. They're not free at all; advertisers have to pay good money for access to their product, which is you.
Or so my view goes :) I could be wrong though.
Selling snake oil becomes no more socially good when the salesman deludes themself into believing the pitch.
The vast majority of products people buy help them solve problems of all kinds. An economic transaction is a win-win for both buyers and sellers. Look at products like the computer, the car, the telephone, etc. I think the world is becoming a better place as a result.
That's what advertising used to do before tracking was a thing. When this was introduced the industry realized that targeting and manipulation is far more profitable and this made ad campaigns that don't do this unviable. Because nobody ever wants to go back to a lower profit margin.
They're so addicted to tracking, and 'retargeting' (meaning repeat ads) that they're just not paying for untracked anymore. Not nearly enough to make an ad-supported website work anyway.
Due to GDPR and the cookie ban, things are turning in Europe though. Because now they no longer have the choice.
And this is why shiny new product is often placed along a half naked beatiful women or alike? Sex sells?
Some marketing indeed exists, that just tries to make a consumer aware of a product. But most marketing campaigns try to associate a certain product with certain attractive person/livestyle/object.
The Malboro Man, the Taste of freedom. Etc.
It is highly manipulative to its core. And with targeted ads, you can play with the target persons fears and desires in a automated way. So far this likely not happening (very well), but the potential is very real and dark.
If anything, this was more common in the pre-internet advertising age. Can't remember the last time I saw an ad like this.
That's quite cynical. No the point is to connect products to interested consumers. Case in point: we recently had a baby so I've been googling for baby stuff. Now I get some ads for more baby stuff. It's relevant to my life far more than Viagra ads or whatever other generic ads could be shown to me. It's not exactly manipulation because I do need lots of baby stuff.
For instance installing publicly accessible cameras in all rooms in all homes would help reduce domestic abuse, however that obviously does not mean it's a net social good. In the same vein helpful target ads do not make up for all of the other shenanigans in manipulating people politically.
(ie we also buy baby stuff but sure as hell the best products are not ie 'pampers' which are in every freaking ad block on TV I ever saw, probably... same for thousand other household products, advertised ones are very rarely proper high quality within their category, since so much is spent on pushing them down everybody's throat).
I can't comprehend how otherwise smart folks can't grok this basic principle of advertising, its pure logic and simple follow-the-money principle. Its fight for your wallet, and your brain controls the wallet. Maybe it doesn't insult your intelligence to be manipulated like a sheep, but it sure does mine.
I guess we could raise him in a cardboard box, bathe him in the sink and not have half this shit that's really for our convenience, but it is all convenient. We're definitely not going that crazy compared to the typical American/Canadian parent...
Connecting products to interested customers often involve manipulating the customer into being interested. Think about sugary cereals targeted at kids with songs and colors.
The human condition has been improved now that we all spend $3/mo on deodorant.
If you want the full story, look elsewhere.
For instance, I have no interest in receiving snail-mail ads for credit cards. I am happy with the ones that I have right now, and regularly research on my own via trusted third parties to see if any are available which would be of interest to me. Still, I am unable to stop receiving mail advertising credit cards to me. There is not even recourse I can take because states have fallen for the same “connecting producers to consumers” argument as above, in the most broad sense, where every human is a potentially interested consumer for every single product.
The business is worse off (because they pay to advertise to me, and I will not get one of their credit cards), I am worse off (because I am upset I receive this mail), the planet is worse off (deforestation), others are worse off (perhaps the time spent by postal workers delivering me junk mail could improve service to others or reduce costs).
So while I agree that advertising is not inherently manipulative, when the audience is captive and uninterested, it becomes manipulation.
- Billboards. You cannot possibly keep these out of your peripheral (or center of) vision while driving without endangering everyone else on the road. - Mailed advertisements. You have to check your mail, for example, for legal summons, that you are required by law to respond to. - Public transit (lest I be auto-shamed). You cannot, where I am, even look toward where a train arrives, without seeing ads.
To remediate just these three advertising venues, you have to drive and board public transit with your eyes closed and not check your mail. These aren’t even activities I’d consider voluntary - people need to get to work to support themselves, and check their mail for legal purposes. Unless your argument is that we all make choices to participate in our sovereign nation’s legal structure and to have jobs that require leaving the home (not everyone can work in a cushy remote role).
Research shows contextual advertising (the way it was done for ever before retargeting became a thing) beats retargeting for both purchases per dollar of ad spend and consumer appreciation / satisfaction (versus annoyance).
But, yes, you are right. Even this was infinitely better than the current situation with ads.
> No the point is to connect products to interested consumers.
You're both right in identifying points of advertising, and they're not in conflict.
Advertising has _two_ points, which I phrase as:
1. Increasing consumer awareness
2. Increasing consumer demand
Increasing consumer awareness generally feels useful: that's finding out what baby products exist, or showing people a new invention or service.
Increasing consumer demand generally feels manipulative: that's showing sugary cereals and crap toys to children, or associating vaping with success, etc.
The two goals usually are working together — but I find it useful to separate which parts of the advertisement are doing what.
You would be better served by talking to other parents, by reading information from consumer organizations, by reading reviews, even by talking to shop personnel (where multiple brands are sold).
Ads attempt to persuade. They can be implemented in manipulative ways, but ads aren't inherently that IMO.
Killing targeted ads will just mean the incumbents will dominate and without competition, consumer prices will rise. Gillette did their first price reduction because of dollar shave club is an example.
Targeted ads gave us none of the things you mentioned, it merely gave them highly-effective ad targeting. But a company can still buy TV ad spots, they can still spread via word-of-mouth or grassroots campaigns, they can still hire people to canvas and pitch, nowadays they can still go viral.
I agree with GP that ads are manipulation, and that we cannot give ad people (or any people, really) tools that are too good in this area.
Literally every big company in existence today started small, disrupting or innovating or just effectively competing at something. Yet somehow they managed to become what they are without targeted advertising?
User tracking is absolutely despicable and must be killed.
Okay, I'm sure they used some of them as well, but that was not their primary advertising mechanic to get the first 1,000,000 signups.
This is no worse than suffering through "Raid Shadow Legends" ads because I have a "gamer" bit flipped somewhere in Google's profile of me. 99% (or even 100%) of stuff advertised to me is hot garbage, even if I'm in the right demographic for the product.
The problem is that targeting is only part of the equation of what you see. The other part is the advertiser's budget. And companies that spend big on marketing are often either selling digital crack (e.g. gacha games, scams, gambling) or simply have the most capital investment (startup of the week, manscaped, Nord VPN, etc.). Neither scenario is a good signal of quality. As a result, the safest approach as a consumer is to ignore all ads.
Non-targeted ads do not mean viagra ads. Non-targeted ads still have the context of the website/app I'm using.
Non-targeted ads mean that I can get ads about specific hardware when I browse my hobby forums; I can get ads about some interesting SaaS when I browse my work related news sites. I don't get anything that's targeting some calculated personality quirks of mine to the highest ad bidder.
No matter how “relevant” an ad may be, you’re still breaking context to insert yourself, and distract me from, the thing I’m actually interested in.
I also think targeted ads are really bad for society in general. They have incentivized the building of companies that have created massive surveillance and manipulation systems on a scale nobody would have dreamt of some decades ago. Think about Stalin or Hitler having the datasets Google or Facebook have built up and how they could have used them. I can't see anything good about targeted advertising unless you buy into the vision that people's only purpose in life is to buy things.
Further, lots of smart people are working on the project of ads. Talented programmers and data scientists. Hopefully less efficient ads will result in a less lucrative ad sector, and more of these folks can be convinced to do something productive with their talents.
Targeted ads usually aren't trying to trick me, they're telling me about products and services I genuinely don't know about. Maybe this will shock people, but I have actually bought things linked straight from ads a handful of times. (Only a handful, but that's more than zero.)
I infinitely prefer targeted advertising rather than the horrible lowest-common-denominator generic non-targeted "grow your dick" and "one weird trick" and "millionth website visitor" garbage. (I just wish there were a button for "don't show me ads for humidifiers anymore because I already bought one after researching, I'm not gonna buy another". So that the targeting worked even better.)
Better by what measure? Not at the expense of privacy. Where is the data going? Who is it being sold to?
Sure, American TV ads are annoying, but they're predictable and sometimes entertaining. American TV ads are so inefficient that they need to work for your attention.
One issue with targeting is receiving antidepressant ads, knowing the algorithm knows that you're depressed. Or receiving baby ads when the algorithm knows you were expecting, but doesn't know you had a miscarriage. There are countless examples of targeting being a danger to the public as well, being used for very effective misinformation campaigns.
The most obvious approach is content based targeting. If someone is reading an article about baby names, put ads for baby clothes next to it. If there’re reading an article about cloud infrastructure, put an AWS ad next to it.
People managed to make and sell perfectly good adverts long before Facebook and Google came along. Have you never noticed that every advert in a trade magazine targets people in that trade?
What they can't do w/o consent is collect data from third party apps and use that to target users in other apps.
1.) It's one of the main reason why surveillance capitalism is so widespread. Some of the worst things that came out of tech in past 20 years are directly or indirectly connected to "targeting ads".
2. ) Better name for targeted adds would be Machine driven adds. And with it comes the counter part of machine driven re-posters re-blogers, ai generated spam content etc. If you didn't have all those "targeted" machine driven networks there would be a lot less reason to build such sites. Since most advertisers would not want to advertise on such sites if they had a choice in it.
3.) With all the crap they bring, they still suck at targeting. They either focus on one search you did a while ago to the exclusion of everything else, they to sell you same expensive stuff for months after you already bought it, or completely irrelevant most of the time.
4.) They make pages load slower, sometimes a lot slower.
There’s a lot of people disagreeing with you, but it’s missing the point, I think.
Everybody can get the experience they want; both you and they can. You can get targeted ads by accepting when an advertiser asks to track you. They can get non-targeted ads by rejecting when an advertiser asks to track them.
The key thing here is that everybody is given the choice. And that’s Apple’s only requirement – they haven’t banned tracking, they have banned tracking without asking the user for their consent first.
Not entirely true: Apple’s iAd platform ran for a few years in the 2010s before being canned in 2016.
It still exists, was just renamed to Ad Platforms (worked there).
When people say "ad tech" now, they mean DSP -- selling their party ads unrelated to the boat company. Apple Store ads are Apple ripping off iOS devs for product placement in its own store, not generic interest-based ads.
Anyone confirm or deny?
They track everything about the device - and the user has almost no control over it.
Sure, they aren't tracking what you're doing INSIDE the FB app. But they track every time you use it, where you use it, the context that led to that usage, etc.
So does Facebook (as much as they're able and allowed to), being fair.
Apple can and does.
And, to be fair, while I don't want Apple tracking that data (however useful/useless it may be), I wouldn't want Facebook tracking it either.
Apple doesn't limit anyone from advertising; they just limit third-party tracking, no?
Gee, I wonder why...
If I use an application then I am clearly using their product and I have a relationship with the application developers.
If that application embeds third-party tracking, I am not clearly doing anything with the third party and I don’t have a relationship with that third party. Therefore Apple requires that the application developers ask for my consent first.
Only one of these needs the user’s consent, and it’s clear why. Apple can act fairly and still hold third-party tracking to a different standard.
Non Apple ads: Opt In for scary third party tracking
Apple Ads: Opt Out for a "less personalized" experience
Which I'm fine with.
Is there any evidence that Apple themselves are tracking across 3rd party application advertisements (this is me assuming that they do track across 1st party apps, which is not fair).
They don’t limit third-party tracking either. They limit third-party tracking without the user’s consent. The only thing advertisers need to do is ask the user for permission to track them.
You can compare the pop-up language Apple shows for an app like FB and the one they show for their own personalized ads to see what I'm talking about. They've also run misleading ads and have made comments that confuse people about what's actually going on.
I'm no apologist for ads, but Ben Thompson is right to point out that this hurts small companies that rely on these targeted ads in order to exist a lot more than it hurts large players like FB.
For example - a grocery store doesn't want to manage 'first party' user data to track what you purchase (and you probably don't want them to), they're bad at that and more likely to do it poorly. They'd rather rely on an ad company they can use instead. This applies to most small businesses that rely on targeted advertising to get their business in front of users that would want it. In Apple's model Amazon doesn't need to say they track you because all purchase data happens on Amazon, but FB does because others use FB to target third party ads. The data doesn't leave FB though so a reasonable person could argue why is this worse?
My personal opinion is that we'd be better off in an equilibrium where these ad driven models are not viable because the models that would replace them would be better on net with incentives more aligned between user and product.
There is a problem here with how user data is handled in some cases, but Apple is also being at best misleading about the issue in a way that benefits themselves and reasonable people could think they're doing the wrong thing.
Because the user has a relationship with the grocery store application and as far as they are aware, only interacting with the grocery store application. They aren’t given the knowledge or opportunity to decide whether to send their data to Facebook or not. All Apple are requiring is that the user be given that knowledge and opportunity.
Apple limits third party tracking without user's consent by both calling it as third party tracking and having it opt in, while Apple's tracking is "personalization" that is opt out.
It's absolutely a dark pattern meant to destroy non apple advertising while making the owners of the OS the only real way to advertise on it. It should be clamped down hard.
For about a year this is no longer true.
You just seem to be skipping over the fact that Apple is not a third-party here. The user has a direct relationship with them.
> the only real way to advertise on it.
The advertising industry has existed for over a hundred years without pervasive third-party tracking. Pervasive third-party tracking is not “the only real way to advertise on it”.
Also cable companies can’t limit others from carrying channels.
Do you think advertisers on Facebook, Google or Amazon get access to all of the data that the platform vendor has?
Do you also want everyone to get access to Google’s search algorithm?
If I had a dollar every time someone on HN yelled “anti trust” about anything no matter how little legal sense it made, I could be my own VC.
Using your dominance in one industry like that could fall afoul of anti monopoly laws.
People make a lot of to-do about it, but, that's not really an unusual thing in the market anymore. Sony has exclusive control of their store, does not permit sideloading, and no, the hardware isn't subsidized.
https://www.extremetech.com/gaming/325504-sony-finally-turns...
Regardless of whether you feel that's also bad, it goes to establish that this is not unusual or particularly noteworthy behavior.
Apple hasn't stopped anybody from advertising, they've only stopped them from doing overly-intrusive cross-app personal tracking. They don't seem to intend to do over-intrusive cross-app personal tracking themselves, so it seems to be a level playing field. So far, at least.
It's important to remember, they aren't stopping them from doing the overly-intrusive cross-app tracking, they just make you actively consent to an app allowing that tracking.
Apple is doing the classic "we don't share with third parties, we just collect a shit ton of data from everywhere and then make people buy our data indirectly via our ad sale services" like google and facebook do today. So it's not shared with third parties, but because of their scale it might as well be in effect size .
It's called App Tracking Transparency and there is a scary prompt when Facebook/others do it. It's called Personalization and a friendly prompt when Apple does it.
It doesn't say that in the article and that's patently false. Apple does not have access to Amazon's data about your activity in the Kindle app. Can they potentially track you in the Apple Books app? Perhaps, but if you trust what they're saying, you're presented first with an opt-out dialog about ad personalization.
They've required consent for cross-organizational tracking. For a single organization, they have only required disclosure in apps (via the privacy nutrition labels).
For instance, Google can still push you to sign into a Google account so they can add all your interactions across services/devices to your profile. They also can still share information between Google native apps for unauthenticated users. This would include if they start to move over apps from other acquired companies under the Google umbrella.
The difference is that I can make an opt-in choice (if possibly a difficult one) on whether I want to interact with Facebook services directly, but I couldn't make a such a choice before on what information Facebook was gathering about me without my consent or knowledge via tracking.
Apple have all of this data (in fact, it's automatically collected and much better quality) because they own the platform on which the data is collected. Therefore, Apple can supply the same services as FB (on iOS only, obvs).
Microsoft did not prevent other browsers from being installed; it just shipped IE by default and made it annoying af to uninstall.
... and entered partnerships with ISPs to have pre-installed listings in IE if the ISP didn't mention a competing browser (p29)
... and entered into arrangements with companies to switch browsers being used (p17)
... and attempted to get Netscape to agree to not compete with Microsoft for Windows browsers (Netscape would be Unix and Mac only if that was done) (p14)
https://www.justice.gov/atr/complaint-us-v-microsoft-corp
There's quite a bit more to DOJ vs Microsoft than just "shipping IE by default".
That a single corporate entity is capable of collecting data does not necessarily mean that said entity is collecting and using that data. Maybe they do! But so far I've seen no evidence of it anywhere from anyone ever.
What I don’t expect is that when I shop on Amazon I get ads showing me what I searched for and bought on Amazon to show up on Facebook (which of course does happen).
What would be the consumer friendly thing for the government to do? Allow more cross app data sharing? Refuse to let any company use the history of what a consumer does at that company for targeting?
Or a company like Facebook can once again encourage users to install a VPN that allows them to track all of the traffic to and from your phone.
https://mashable.com/article/facebook-used-onavo-vpn-data-to...
It turns out that people (or at least Android users) aren't as dumb as Apple users think they are. (Or maybe it says something about Apple users that Apple and other Apple users think that Apple users are too dumb to be able to make this decision for themselves?)
And yes there has been security vulnerabilities caused by bypassing the Google Play Store by a little company I am sure you have heard of.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.cnet.com/google-amp/news/fo...
But Google or Android is not exactly a model of protecting users privacy.
https://www.theverge.com/2019/1/30/18204064/apple-google-mon...
Every Chinese phone company...
But Google or Android is not exactly a model of protecting users privacy.
And neither is Apple.
it is.
Amazon also created its own line of devices and its own fork of Android and replaces Google Play Services APIs with its own. But how many applications are successful distributing only on Amazon’s Android store? How many western developers are going to bypass Google Play Store?
- Company F was doing ads using X mechanism on Company A's devices.
- Company A banned X mechanism under the false claim of "privacy."
- Now Company A is going to use X mechanism to launch their own competitor to Company F's platform (because X is what makes the ad platform a worthwhile expense for advertisers; Company A already uses X mechanism to market its own products and services to its customers, and they simply banned Company F and third parties so they could eliminate existing and potential competition.)
Or in other words, almost as textbook an example of anticompetitive behavior as you can get.
It’s the sane thing in this case with Apple.
Besides, Apple isn’t banning third parties from sharing information. They just have to ask permission. What’s the government suppose to do? Say Apple isn’t allowed to ask consumers whether they want to be tracked across parties?
This situation would not be a conflict of interest because Apple has no duty to third party advertisers
Consider: Amazon has the majority of e-commerce sales today in the west. This is largely in part of decisions makes 20 years ago to allow honest reviews by real customers, both good and bad, earning strong customer trust. Now they're making money by selling the top spot on their search results and calling it "advertising". It's not. It's the sale of all that customer trust they spent 20 years building up. And the money they make on selling that trust is massive.
Consider: Apple is loved by its customers. They trust them. Apple means quality, security, and all the other good things they want. They're also at 30% of global mobile phone sales- massive market power.
Now it's time to start selling off that customer trust for profit.
Being Apple, the first move is to attack the entire online ad industry via privacy improvements- I'm not saying it's a bad thing that they did it, but I am suggesting they didn't do it for anything other than profit motive. Next, join the industry with a competitor in the space that takes advantage of all the things Apple knows about their customers. Trade the trust they've built up for a payout in cash.
It was either that or try to invent a new product. Since Steve Jobs died that hasn't gone very well.
If you have iOS 12 or later and you have 2FA set up, your Apple Health data is E2E encrypted.
Apple won't release sales figures for it. It's such a small market, compared to everything else that Apple does. Being the biggest fish in a very small pond doesn't add up to much.
> Apple Silicon breathed new life into the mac lineup
No disagreement- I'm using one right now. Fantastic chip, the M1. But it's an iteration on an existing product, not a revolution. It's not something new. It doesn't enable anything that you couldn't do before.
"Digital advertising is not a bad thing. We've never said digital advertising is a bad thing. What is not good is vacuuming up people's data when they're not doing so on an informed basis. That's what is bad. And so we try to put the user in the driver seat there to own the data."
Amazon wins because it's more like visa or a physical goods internet than a specific store.
I think that relying on adtech is poisonous in the long run.
"While Apple effectively tracks users on its own platform, the pre-installed apps are exempted from displaying a message asking permission to track users.
This is because Apple’s Anti-Tracking Transparency only applies to the apps that use third-party data to track users. Since Apple’s tracking stays within its own ecosystem, the company’s native apps are not subject to the policy. An exception Apple made for itself drew backlash, with some comparing the “nefarious”-sounding prompt third-party developers have to show to a far less ominous “personalized ads” pop-up Apple has to show itself."
Apps like Facebook can track the user any which way they please. They can't track users in other apps without consent.
That's... awful? Building an ad blocker on top of Mv3 is exactly what Google is hoping for. If nobody built an ad blocker for it, how much market share do you think Chrome would keep?
The entire share of users who don't use AdBlock. The other users don't give them revenue anyway.
If anyone knows of any studies into tracking of individual users, please point me to it, I would be very interested in reading that.
Apple didn't cut Facebook out of the picture for pro-privacy, 'user-centric' reasons. This is the same playbook they used in 2010 when they kneecapped Flash. It wasn't about battery life or viruses then, it was to clear a path for the App Store to be the focal point for app and game development.
Google has something like this moat within their search engine dominance, likewise Facebook does for social, but both of them are rather limited slices in comparison with the OS itself.
So, we arrive at this junction - Apple lobbies, for the consumer of course, to prevent tracking across the web, and conveniently limits their number of competitors to one, that being Microsoft which seems rather inept at this advertising thing anyway.
It's hard to root for Google or Facebook here, but it's also pretty obvious that our friends in Cupertino don't have our best interests in mind.
The 1% of users running some custom Android build aren't really relevant here, Google scrapes up plenty.
https://www.scss.tcd.ie/doug.leith/apple_google.pdf
> That is, almost two order of magnitude is uploaded by Android (3.6MB) than by iOS at startup, while Android downloads around a third (952MB) of the data of iOS (2.6GB).
The paper goes on into a lot more detail of tracking what identifiers are sent when and how often.
In particular, look at figure 4 on page 6.
Errr, what? AFAIK Apple has never run ads for 3rd party apps outside of its own App Store , and what’s this no sets out downloading apps from a developer’s website? They all come from the App Store (note, the article is specifically talking about mobile app advertising at this point).
I wonder if Apple will also try to prevent that or will just figure it's a small enough number that allowing it will help them with the nerds. Informally, when I see something on someone else's device, ad blocking doesn't appear to be popular. I can't imagine using the web without it.
Apple is being very hypocritical here. Privacy matters until they tell you it’s ok, don’t worry about it. With Budd Trible moving on, I guess this is the state of affairs. Sad.
Let's be honest here, the internet runs on ads, full stop. I have no concrete data but if you were take an aggregate of tech workers whose salary is made either fully or partially on ad revenue either directly by their employer OR customers, it would have to be a significant percentage, right? I'm not gonna guess but it's gotta be significant. Hell, FAANG alone is tremendously ad-driven, and those are largely considered the most prestigious jobs in the industry.
If you've spent 10 years working in tech, what are the chances that you've never taken a dollar that was earned through an online ad? Maybe I'm overly cynical here and I'm no Apple cheerleader here, but we see this same pattern emerge over and over and over again. Companies have to grow or else. That's always been the game, how did we honestly think it would go any other way than this?
I'm not trying to make an excuses here, I'm simply pointing out that the entire foundation of the internet economy is built on the premise that what you do on the network can and should be tracked for profit, and to complain about one of the wealthiest companies on the planet finally in the game demonstrates naivety. Business does not care about morals, business cares about making money. That is how businesses are incentivized to behave. There's no legitimate counteracting force (sorry but individuals angrily venting frustration on an internet forum is not a threat to their business) to motivate Apple to behave any differently. They know that they just need to keep providing a better service than the alternatives and as long as the ads are slightly less crappy than Android, people aren't going to leave Apple.
Argue right or wrong all you want, but this is the reality.
I would have hoped Apple stayed away from this business.
This is greed, imho.
https://nypost.com/2022/09/14/facebook-spied-on-private-mess...
At least Apple has a record of keeping their users safe from government.
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/01/14/apple-refuses-barr-request-t...
Which sandbox do you like to play in? Does it even matter?
adguard is not epic games, nothing gonna happen.
and even more than that - cdns/antiddos gather more data that usually not directly available to social networks because clicks doesnt originate from tracked pages.
EDIT: Forgot when writing this down (been thinking about this for a while), but this would only apply to Publicly traded companies.
Would be very profitable for tv stations, though! And we'd see a ton more billboards covering everything.
That would cover all the Apples, Samsungs, Rokus, and so forth of the world which is what we care about most, I think.
Ethical marketing is a hard problem to solve, I don't think the best solution is focusing on where it happens, instead it should be focused on how it's happening (targeting) and what the content is.
Because if we do it based on what the FOUNDING FATHERS believed, unless you can find a quote where they said the first amendment would apply to advertisements, then we can conclude that the first amendment doesn't apply at all.
A dangerous line of thinking. If we're just going to keep what the Founding Fathers said as the only standard for the First Amendment, then only the Federal government would be bound by it. States could could still pass their own laws that punish the exercise of individual rights, free speech included.
Curiously, conservatives say this is more democratic since people will get to vote on anything they want without judges getting in the way, even though there's no right to vote in the constitution.
That's an unreasonable view. The First Amendment says nothing about text on computers or lyrics in music being protected speech, yet we accept that they are and the Supreme Court agrees.
The second problem is, this is probably not going to fly against freedom of speech, because it's effectively censorship of a certain kind. And if it does pass, what could be the next flavor of communication to be outlawed? Maybe it's not something you're going to like.
I much prefer blocking ads (which I've come to be incredibly effective at), and still have the law allow people to advertise. And I hate ads with a passion! But the alternative could be worse.
Banning ads right now seems like a sensible thing to do if we want to reach climate goals.
I mean, we did it for prostitution, so it could work?
Advertising is cancer.
[1] https://hypebeast.com/2022/3/apple-made-6-5-billion-usd-by-r...
I get that work is probably paying for most people's but it's not really usable out of the box without a pricey add-on. You can literally buy an entire monitor (with stand and VESA mount) for $200.
How are they supposed to make more money from phones if not taking a cut of FB's advertising money?
I would prefer it if we weren't a consumer society, if our entire way of life wasn't powered by selling things, with advertising being the biggest underlying aspect. If Apple is smart they will retain their brand image of quality and elite lifestyle, because that's how they advertise their products. But they certainly aren't going to abandon ads.
To be clear: I have adhd. Ads are intentionally designed to catch the attention of your average person with reasonable control of their attention. I have no chance in hell of keeping my attention on the article when I have to blast past 6-7 unblockable ads per article.
The same goes for plenty of forms of telemetry; it doesn't equal individual tracking or tracking at all (before someone comes in with a cohort theory).
Some things like predictive text entry (Microsoft did/does that? And grammarly and Gboard) have an easy implementation where you ignore privacy and simply dump all user entry onto a server and do the heavy lifting there. Apple's version of that might be Siri recordings when recognition fails to improve that, but I haven't seen it with ads or text entry (yet?).
At some point no company should be doing any of this without homomorphic encryption or a good level of sanitisation. All of Apple's telemetry that you can inspect (either locally or simply by adding a proxy) is well-anonymised. It doesn't hide what specific binaries are causing errors as that would defeat the point of measuring reliability, and when you connect to someone, they will know what IP connected to them, but other than that, it's not as bad as people tend to make it out to be.
But the mere existence of it undercuts the privacy claims and creates a giant moral hazard (if AppStore search is lousy then people have to buy ads/sponsored keywords, and the clear desire for ad businesses to start invading privacy).
I really wish it didn’t exist :-/
Apple doesn't care about what cyberlibertarians think about their business practices. Baking in ads won't affect sales (might even prop it up if used to subsidize devices).
So Stocks app in MacOS, no stocks when you open it, but the news and ads is what you see.
I do hope we don't see ads in the Weather app at some point, that would be a shame.
Edit - I was curious, if you select APPL on the side and scroll a little, you get ads too, so they're on all side tabs - https://i.imgur.com/2X3Et0l.png
As far as I know, this is the case for low end models from vendors like Xiaomi. And even there you can turn it off. I never dreamed of Apple doing something so detrimental to its famed User Experience that feels so cheap and disrespectful.
Does Apple's System Integrity Protection protect apps like Stocks?
Regret. Panic. Uncertainty. What the fuck am I going to do now?
These are literally the trashiest, scammiest, lowest-tier clickbait ads. You would expect these on the bottom of tabloid articles from The Sun, not a stocks app (!) from Apple (!!).
Holy shit, I am appalled!
What I hadn't seen until this was a marketing campaign that actually proselytized so many into proclaiming the message for free. On HackerNews, Reddit and in public places you're likely to find someone vouching for Apple's privacy practices sometimes with the same verbiage that's on the billboards! Maybe that's a testament to Steve Jobs's lasting marketing impact.
I personally see the incentive structure which makes Apple more privacy-friendly than say Google. But I'm deeply suspicious of such a convenient message that the largest corporation in the world puts its resources behind. Also, being more privacy-friendly than Google and being privacy friendly are two different things.
But now that they are getting into the ad space that incentive structure benefit pretty much crumbles away.
It's also clear at this point, the most profitable ads in the industry are the ones that most take advantage of personal data - this isn't a secret. The difference in profitability can be stark too, which is why I worry so much about the incentive structure.
[0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IAd [1]: https://searchads.apple.com/
Part of it just comes with the territory. Apple is a computer company that prides itself on not only having a sense of taste, but being able to impose that sense of taste on its business partners. This is contrary to the goals of advertisers - tastelessness kind of comes with the territory and advertising inherently messes with the user experience.
PS: Still use a MBP, iPhone and an Apple Watch. :(
Rather disappointed that Apple didn't take this route. They do do something similar with their virus database (XProtect).
That type of capability is core to most general purpose OS’s today. Any significant company is running EDR, etc that’s even more intrusive
in theory, that's ok, if we have healthy, functioning markets that are free from undue influence of any individual participant. the "invisible hand" of the market would drive it iteratively toward more privacy (assuming this is valued by more than minor segment, greater than ~15% of the market). the market would (and should) be an ongoing conversation between suppliers and consumers to reach all the profitable corners of supply and demand, rather than a couple behemoths with megaphones telling us how great they are, rather than showing it through their products and practices.
p.s. - has anyone else noticed adguard doing port-scans on your gateway from their dns service IPs? i haven't dug into it yet, so i don't know whether it's spoofed or whatnot.
The market is for advertisers, and advertisers - whether they are small or large businesses - value tracking and measurability of their advertising investments.
in any case, my point was about the consumer electronics market, which is apple's core industry, and which, in a healthy and well-functioning market, also has a key stake in this conversation (driving it toward non-distorted, optimally efficient outcomes).
I disagree. Incrementality studies (which measure ROI) as advertisers want them are basically impossible with ATT. You need to be able to pass an ID between apps.
but the kicker is, is it better than just doing studies without the more invasive attribution data, especially in relation to the higher price and market consolidation? very unlikely. ad monopolization means more of the value in the value chain goes to the monopolist regardless of the proportion of value they provide in the chain.
Absolutely, as the controlled incrementality study is impossible without either attribution or some group-based approximation of attribution (ie. federated cohorts, etc.)
So the idea is that you run the experiment, and this can then help you understand where you should attribute value, as you know that the only difference between the two groups was the exposure to FB ads.
Now, to be fair, unless FB is most of your spend, you still have a bunch of problems, but they'll wash out equally across conditions (theoretically, at least) so the estimate should be good.
I think modern incrementality studies give solid proof of the value of an ad on the basis of a good model of how the world works. Of course, models can be wrong - it could turn out that solipsism is true, physics is false, and the world outside of your own mind is a figment of your imagination!
That the world is complex and models are inherently wrong does not mean that nothing of value to businesses was lost with ATT.
I agree but where do we see this? Everywhere I look it’s mega corps. Food, fuel, power, electronics, clothes. I can’t think of a good example of the ideal relationship.
(I think they've since delayed the rollout of that system indefinitely, after public outcry.)
Does it matter in practice? No. But it makes me feel very different about it. That's important too.
Sounds like you’re taking exception with the explicit parental notification, where a parent with a child enrolled in their iCloud “family” can request to be alerted when their minor child takes an action on the phone owned by the parent.
The EFF wrote an awful blog that deliberately confused the already confusing release from Apple. Your privacy is almost certainly weaker as a result, as various entities can use a subpoena or warrant to access your files.
And once you're scanning files with one flag set, nothing technologically prevents the scanning of files without that flag being set. And to quote myself from the Google Stadia brouhaha - "companies lie in PR statements" - so I have no reason to trust Apple's statement that they would never scan other files.
You need to read up on how the system worked, because they picked a design that made absolutely no sense if they wanted to do that. They’d have to redesign it to work in a different way if they wanted to do that.
The material that they scan for is illegal to possess. You should assume that anyone that accepts cleartext uploads of binary data is scanning for that and other material.
At the end of the day, you don’t have the juice to negotiate contractual protections, so corporate self-interest is really your only real protection.
Do you know what else is illegal to possess? Proof of abortions in some states. Proof of being gay in many countries. Winne the Pooh in at least one country.
> You should assume that anyone that accepts cleartext uploads of binary data is scanning for that and other material.
Again, since this seems to be lost every time, this isn't being checked post upload. That matters.
From a technical standpoint, at least you are protected from future policy changes if your files in the cloud are encrypted.
Understand, I am playing the devils advocate role more than anything else.
The key point I'm trying to make is that where the data is located matters for whether Apple (or Microsoft or Redhat or whichever company) has the ability or right to read and report on that data.
> at least you are protected from future policy changes if your files in the cloud are encrypted.
If, and only if, that data is never synced back to your phone (which Apples does currently).
The phone would be literally incapable of determining if there were any matches. Please read up on how it was designed to work.
But I think that's pretty thin gruel, since now you're just a feature-flag (or even a bug) away from all content being scanned. More broadly, the entire endeavor is very much at odds w/ the sentiment expressed in their public advertising.
They want to scan on device so they do not have to scan it in the cloud.
Because people are in full FUD mode on this, we're stuck storing photos without full end-to-end encryption because Apple has do the scanning on their side.
> Well, there is another option: Apple could actually respect your privacy, support end-to-end encryption, and not scan your content at all.
This is not an option you, or Apple, think there is to choose.
Peoples FUD and misrepresentation over what was happening and your snark over "yes but their advertising campaign says things stay on the phone" (which is literally true) is IMO likely actually accelerating the privacy degradation. When they are compelled by law to scan this all centrally in one place in the cloud, I guess you will be happier that it's more invasive but just happening "elsewhere"?
If you don't want them to check for unwanted content, don't put your content on their machines.
That’s not true. The system didn’t work the way you are assuming. The device had no knowledge of any matches. The “scanning” was a coöperation of client-side and server-side code, each with an extremely limited knowledge of the data involved.
Apple says this would only be used on iCloud synced photos, but I don't see any technical reason the process could not be performed for any photo.
Am I mistaken?
> The device had no knowledge of any matches.
True, but how is it relevant?
Also the scanning was calculating hashes based on content, not just metadata.
It’s not. The device has no idea if there are any matches. Everybody is assuming how it works without actually reading how it works.
On-device scanning like that would be pointless, though. IIRC, stuff uploaded to their cloud is already accessible to Apple for server-side scanning. The controversial thing was the on-device scans would trigger some kind of upload of un-uploaded stuff to Apple for further investigation.
No, a load of people assumed it would do that, but it’s not possible with the proposed scheme because the device had no knowledge of any matches.
No, the stated behaviour was that it would be uploaded to the cloud at the same time as the encrypted image. Uploaded data was still "encrypted" "at rest" (but possible for them to decrypt, just not done routinely). The whole point of the client-side scanning was that scanning was done locally on the phone and uploaded with it, as an explicit alternative to them regularly decrypting and scanning all user data on their servers. The stated operation was; if the phone fingerprint matched a public CSAM fingerprint list, then it would be automatically decrypted and scanned with a second, private fingerprinting algorithm on the server - only if this second, private fingerprint matched would the data be flagged up for potential violation (and inspected).
The alternative to this was them just regularly scanning all data in their cloud anyway. Apparently people are happier with that option.
That means the alternative would be to send the photos to Apple and Apple scans the photo. Either way you send the photo to Apple and meta data gets generated about CSAM. It’s just a matter of where the data gets generated.
I’m also uneasy about it happening on the phone. But honestly, by it being processed on the phone, that means it can be encrypted before it gets to Apple’s servers.
I’m basically working under the assumption that scanning for CSAM is legally required.
It is explicitly not legally required in the US [1]. Providers are required to report "apparent CSAM" that they find on their own, but they are not compelled to search their servers or private devices for its presence.
And this is the case for a very good reason: if it was mandated by US law, then prosecutions would be subject to much stronger 4th amendment review under the "state action doctrine" (i.e., the companies are searching your files without probable cause as compelled representatives of the government.) The current arrangement evades this review under the very thin fig-leaf that US providers are doing the searching on their own.
[1] https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/LSB/LSB10713
Which would be unfortunate. At that point, you won't be able maintain digital privacy from the govt w/o de-facto becoming a criminal.
CSAM is, I think, simply the initial justification for these systems, since it's widely reviled. But the system itself is not CSAM-specific, and the temptation to expand its scope will likely be irresistible.
If your goal was to become an authoritarian tyrant, you would be very happy to have this in place. :-)
Results about matches aren’t ever on the phone in the first place. Only the server can determine if there are any matches.
That particular issue was the privacy advocacy people run amok.
Even MEGA, which signals the virtues of privacy/security through the prominence of decryption keys on its UI flows, will still report illegal content to authorities and display a message saying so if content was removed for that reason.
Any publicly traded company that touts perfect privacy cannot deliver what they are claiming, or they'd become the service of choice for every type of disenfranchised person - including child abusers.
Apple has received much more flak than the average corporation over this issue because this fundamental impossibility of perfect privacy clashed with its own privacy signaling in a loud way, and the flurry of debate over the technical merits of the novel, widely shared on-device scanning solution caused much more scrutiny than the boring server-side scanning that has been ubiquitous for decades.
But the fact is that no matter how Apple tries to approach the CSAM problem, it will ultimately have to weed out child abusers from its servers or be publicly and legally lambasted. That is what society has decided is best for the welfare of children, and as a result we will have to live with an imperfect level of privacy as provided by such entities.
FYI loath means "unwilling", so it doesn't make sense here. "Loath to X" is like "I would loathe doing X". The word you're looking for is "likely".
From there, it seems to have developed as an American slang to describe "infestations" of other kinds.
And I remember that "Apple is not in the Ad Business" before 2018 was the most cited defence and reason on HN. That was before the war on tracking, the submarine articles on ads, and the attack on Facebook.
Because you know what? Privacy is a Fundamental Human Right. And because iPhone is the only smartphone that values your privacy, banning iPhone sales in your country is also against Human Right.
>But I'm deeply suspicious of such a convenient message.
I was probably the only few who was deeply deeply suspicious of the "Dont be Evil" Google in the early 00s, in an era of "Dont be Evil", when everyone in Tech thought they were Saint. The self righteousness of Google, I thought nothing could be worse than Google's hypocrisy. I mean how can something be worse than "Dont be Evil"?
Well here we are. The era of "Fundamental Human Right". A company that worked with CCP, invested $275B to build and improve the whole CE supply chain in China. Helping those companies to compete in area where CCP has a strategic interest, Continue to invest and help those companies to set up operation in India or Vietnam in the name of "Diversification from China" as PR headlines.
I don't think that's accurate or fair, and I think (as I often see) it misses a lot of context around where "Don't Be Evil" came from, and what it really meant.
"Don't Be Evil" was basically to highlight and contrast Google's desired culture from Microsoft's at the time of the late 90s/early 00s. That is, at the time, and especially early in Microsoft's existence, MS was pretty famous for "dirty tricks". E.g look at the early history/origins of DOS, anti-competitive tactics WRT DR-DOS [1], how they fought the browser wars, the full history outlined in Microsoft v United States, etc. The icon for MS in Slashdot at the time was famously the Gates "borg" icon, and that is how a lot of people viewed MS.
When it comes to Google, I think the whole idea behind "Don't Be Evil" is that they believed that you could make money withOUT dirty tricks, and up until 2010-2012 or so I think this was largely true. People flocked to Google and their products not because they were forced to, but because the products were genuinely much better than the competition at the time. Search, GMail, Maps, StreetView, Chrome - when all of these came out I remember thinking "holy shit this is amazing".
The problem, though, is that at some point all very successful companies reach a size where I believe it's only possible to respond to your economic incentives, which are to grow at any cost. I mentioned 2010-2012 (maybe a little later, 2012-2014) because that's when I feel like I really saw Google's approach change to really squeeze the pennies from their existing business, e.g. when they made ads more and more indistinguishable from organic results, or when they made it so that any remotely commercial search term has an ENTIRE page of ads above the fold. Paying "the Google tax" became a real thing, e.g. you'd have to pay Google for an add JUST on your domain name because competitors might bid higher.
Thus, if anything, I give Google props for "holding out" a good ~12-15 years before their growth and economic incentives made it "must increase revenue at all costs" and the beancounters took over.
You mean like colluding with other big companies to suppress wages ? Your timelines don't check out since there's evidence of this going back to 2007.
Embrace. Enhance. Extinguish.
I forgot about the Borg icon. M$ for MS in the 90s was what the cool kids did
I think the doubleclick acquisition hopped this into overdrive and also allowed Google to start screwing both sides by extracting larger and larger rents from advertisers with its near monopoly power and ad cartel with Facebook. We saw the Google tracking cookie spread like a plague shaking down users for data even if they did not use a Google service, as sites effectively needed to install googles tracking cookie on its customers computers to take full advantage of the Google ad monopoly, obliterating the pretence of consent you had with a service like gmail where you were at least consciously agreeing to data scraping.
I honestly think it took them almost no time at all to go from pagerank and spiders to leap towards building their panopticon and the modern surveillance economy. I think the reason people didn’t consider them evil is that what they were doing was so innovative and groundbreaking that people didn’t fully understand the implications. The way their business operates shouldn’t even be legal with them playing both sides of the ad market and their relentless spying being opt-out at best if you have sufficient technical knowledge. The spying of Google and companies like that it’s undermining government privacy protections at this point as the government can acquire spy data it couldn’t gather itself legally (for good reason) from private companies.
I’ve seen this happen before. But not with a big corporation.
There is a short clip of his speech at the event which was reported by NBC News, in which he states the boundaries of their advertisement program at the time.[2]
EDIT: There is also this story from the Verge in 2014 which includes a lengthy quote about the advertisement program.[3]
[0] https://archive.epic.org/2015/06/tim-cook-backs-privacy-cryp...
[1] https://archive.epic.org/june1/
[2] https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/apple/its-wrong-apple-ceo-tim-c...
[3] https://www.theverge.com/2014/9/17/6368669/tim-cook-talks-up...
Yes, he said that after Apple failed in the ads business, just as it was focussing on leveraging its platform control against the firms that had beat it to reshape the field for the next try.
The first sentence of the actual article links to when Tim Cook said that.
Privacy is very different for most of the ads Apple are currently showing too. Search ads work without the need for tracking because when people are searching for something you show them ads for things they are searching for now, not from some model of their interests created from their tracked internet history.
This is why Apple can have an ad business and also destroy Facebooks (and others) ad business based on tracking - they don't need to squeeze every dollar from targeted ads.
But the writing was on the wall for anyone who knew what to look for. And it's the same with the likes of Paypal. I refuse to use these services because they're not banks and are not beholden to the same rules (they're getting more regulated, and my find themselves to be a bank equivalent eventually).
I wasn't very suspicious at the time, but learned to be. My take on this is different though. I don't think it was a case of self-righteousness as much as extreme naivete of some postdocs that were just entering the business world. naivete in thinking a statement such as that couldn't be twisted to the point it meant less that it already does ("evil" is not well defined), and naivete to think they wouldn't be the ones twisting it, whether on purpose or subconsciously, as business needs slowly changed and they had to justify keeping their business afloat and profitable, and people in jobs, and shareholders happy.
You either set up your business such that it's incentivized to align with your morals, or your business (the market) will incentivize you to change your morals to align with it.
If nothing else, we've learned that practices that seem mostly benign one decade at low scale can become very troubling the next decade when done at a much larger scale and/or when additional consequences of the practice become known. Choices made that align with your morals at one time may have consequences that mean you were wrong, even if you couldn't really have known it, but now your business relies on this prior decision.
Running a business is hard, making overreaching statements you can't live up to later is easy.
As a counter example of marketing gone wrong, Amazon has very steadfastly never sold their customer data to anyone. No one ever thought for a second that they did this because they were interested in privacy.
Apple usually designs their experiences around things they control end to end.
Alliances of mutual benefit are still good.
If you do good, people will talk about it, and you get to talk about it.
But my big problem is... where do I go? It's not like Android phones are better--I write native apps on both, I have 9 Android phones sitting to the left of me right now, and 6 iDevices to my right--they're worse to use. They're a night mare to code for compared to iOS.
I write Linux, Windows, and Mac code from post Ives 16"MBP. The OS is as good as any Linux I use (it's worse in some ways, but better than others). The hardware is impressive. I have tried the Linux on Windows stuff, Windows is the worst.
It's not like it was 20 years ago, when MacOSX was in its infancy, and Linux was awesome, and you could reinstall Sawfish WM on Linux running on the Windows laptop the company gave you. Apple hardware/software has its warts, but overall it's pretty good stuff all things averaged. So I'd love to escape their growingly evil ecosystem of services, but it's not clear what the development rig better and more free/enabling than this would be.
In any case, I think Linux replaces MacOS without much protest. I hated working around Mac-specific idiosyncrasies anyways, and while a number of devs might protest, Apple hardware makes for fine Linux machines these days. You're right to identify that iOS is harder to replace, but it's hard to imagine a long-term solution that doesn't involve Apple allowing sideloading. I really hope they do the right thing here, but that's all we can do.
But the super glib part of me is unable to escape from the idea that there is an original sin with Android, with its complications around activities and the like, and the JVM, that make the weird jittery lagginess inevitable. I know that in theory you should be able to have a high perf layer for graphics and animations, but where is it?
It's just embarassing that somehow we've ended up in a situation where there is so much money poured into an "open" (yes I know it's not open but) system and yet it still feels so bad compared to iOS on a... 4 year old device
This might not be the case any more, it’s been years since I’ve ran Android, but there once was a time when running cyanagenmod (I think it was called) on a HTC handset gave you a better experience than iOS on an iPhone.
I really do wonder what would happen if Microsoft made a fork of Android with a replacement for Google Play Services (maybe something that emulated many of the APIs, putting Google in an ironic situation to say that its APIs are protected under copyright law)
Edit: I just checked the stocks app on my MacBook M1 Max and there are unrelated adverts alongside finance news items.
I am appalled and regretting my my m1 max (64gb ram, 4tb ssd) purchase for the first time. Up till now its has been one my of best tech purchases in my life. Not anymore.
This is a sign of pure greed. The most profitable company wants even more profits and will damage its brand to do so.
I feel like an idiot buying a $7,000 aud computer to have the native apps contain ads.
It's disgusting.
Made in jest, but oddly nearing reality.
They later removed it, and tried to spin it as a "temporary feature while they resolved bugs in those pieces of software", though it's hard to imagine what apps like TextEdit needed a network kernel extension for...
https://www.zdnet.com/article/apple-removes-feature-that-all...
Or just use alternatives to the offending apps. I don’t mind Apple’s stock software and try to use it in most cases to avoid the software tinkering trap, but it’s not like there’s any that’s best in class/irreplaceable.
I think the commenters objection is more about principle.
If you do try again, my advice is: Play to the strengths of the new OS.
MacOS makes decisions for you (usually good ones), but you're SOL if you don't like them. This culture affects native apps, too.
For me, getting good results out of Linux has been a question of putting in more up-front work to figure out what I actually want the computer to do. The result is... very comfy.
I use Linux as a daily, but I still have a windows computer for all the things you can't do anywhere else. Random executables that I (begrudgingly) need for work, life, etc.
It's definitely getting better, but it's still not quite there. I still need my windows computer for various things that have no alternative.
Though I have a harder time thinking about macos things that are lacking in Linux apart from the Microsoft Office and the Adobe Suite. Especially since the dev experience on Linux is much better considering your servers or embedded devices are running on linux and macOS just adds an unnecessary layer of complexity to your dev environment. yea, you often don't realize it, until you work with C (which might sneek in as a library in your favorite higher language written in C for efficiency) or something else "native".
My point being it's much harder to get rid of windows than getting rid of macos. Even with a Mac I still needed a windows machine at least for games. But many people maybe just need pc + office + Adobe which is exactly mac.
The Windows installation remains largely untouched and unconfigured, and only used for when there's no other option than a damn .exe. It's permanently there as an option when required.
I think I've booted it about 20 times in 5 years.
If I really need windows (eg to connect itunes to my phone, or for testing websites in IE), I use a virtualbox VM.
I use it as a generalist dev (so, interacting with lots of different environments) as well as hobby & entertainment (incl. photography).
The biggest pain point IMO is lack of a good email application. They're all aggravating in different ways.
The initial getting-started process requires a bit of reading to figure out hardware support and get a few things dialed in. That's a little painful, but shouldn't be a deal-breaker for dev types.
If you want to jump ship from the Windows/Mac dichotomy, check out Plasma. Runs great on Debian. Debian's less "sexy" than other distros, but it's a great solution for the "I just wanna get my work done" crowd.
Have you tried Raw Therapee or Darktable? I'm not sure how well they would work first-hand, but they sound promising for photo editing and might have some overlap with Capture One
That's not as hard as you make it sound
I developed on a Mac for 15+ years.
Plasma is actually well polished and reliable, much to my surprise as someone who never really cared for KDE.
Bluetooth headphones actually work reliably now for me, whereas I used to not even bother because Bluetooth audio was always a gamble on Linux in the past.
Even just running a live Linux instance off of a USB drive can give you an idea if the latest versions of Linux + Pipewire can solve your use case better than distributions that are based on older software, like Ubuntu and PopOS are.
May give a rolling distro a chance when I do a new build in the late spring next year. Thinking of doing open loop water cooling for the first time. Mad as well go rolling release for the OS.
12.10 had Amazon Search baked in: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2012/10/privacy-ubuntu-1210-am...
17.04 and later have ads in the terminal greeting messages: https://news.softpedia.com/news/canonical-under-fire-for-put...
When even my healthcare websites contain Google tracking tags, it's getting harder to find _anything_ untainted by advertising companies, even after paying what I would consider a reasonable price for the service itself.
Sounds like we’ll need OS level uBO.
PS if you’re serious, I’m interested in your m1
This a feature of the system, not a bug. Companies have to keep growing because analysts and the money people decide that's how the system works.
Especially with an upside down population pyramid.
I'm glad that you will, because unless a lot of people do this, it'll just prove to Apple that their customers will keep buying their products no matter what. Nine times out of ten, what Apple does is make decision that loyal users hate, but then those same people keep buying their products anyway, so they just stop listening to them at a certain point.
Actually even the software is somewhat suspect but it's still leagues ahead of the "competition".
/s