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Comment by jiscariot | Hacker News Reader

It is pretty amazing that Apple gets to pull the "we're the good guys" while their market is affluent people able to spend 1k+ on hardware. They call their ad-tech "user tailored experience" and label FB's as "tracking".

Meanwhile FB provides free services to two billion people and get to be the scapegoat for NYT and Apple. Yes, they sell adds--just like the entire media landscape going back hundreds of years.

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FB doesn't just "sell ads". They do their best to snoop on users (and non-users) in every context they can to better target advertising. And there's no easy way to say "stop tracking me". I think it's perfectly reasonable to be a little miffed about that.

20 years ago we called software designed to do this kind of thing "spyware". How did it get normalized to the point that people defend it?

And regarding the comparison to traditional media: if the NYT had a PI following me around every day, I wouldn't trust them either.

Most companies selling ads have to do tracking in order to insure their customers are actually getting what they paid for with their marketing campaigns instead of having fake bot views. I’m not entirely sure how Apple can avoid that and still appease its ad customers

It’s easier to fight fraud when you own the entire stack from the hardware, the OS, the App Store, and the SDKs.

You’re not wrong, and I’m definitely an Apple fan at the moment. I just don’t see how they can’t start tracking us if they want their new ads division to succeed. As a customer, I’m a little worried about this new division.

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