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Comment by mrtksn | Hacker News Reader

Isn't this a cat and a mouse game? The moment this actually start causing problems they will change how parameters work. Maybe the easiest would be to use a single encoded parameter which would be decoded on the server and Apple or anyone else won't be able to change a thing about it.

This is a MITM attack where Apple plays the good guy(or control freak, depending on how you feel about it) but MITM attacks are nothing new.

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Apple is pushing PCM (private click measurement) as a middle safe ground, but nobody would adopt it if more invasive and accurate measures continued working.

They're probably hoping that advertisers will retreat to PCM instead of continuing the cat and mouse game.

PCM is an in-progress standard that, at a high level, allows measuring ad campaign success without tracking individual users. No such restrictions apply to query parameters, of course - so PCM is inherently more private.

It’s easy enough to encode item IDs (e.g. the ID of a video) with various tracking data in a way that only the website itself can separate them. Decoding can be done at the CDN level, e.g. Cloudfront Functions.

True but is all that work and processing worth it? It needs to function on a mass scale.

CF functions are cheap, but at scale it's more than an irritant.

Didn't Facebook already start doing exactly that? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32129100

Agreed. More simply couldn't any ad tracker just have a dynamic parameter name so it's impossible to distinguish between a parameter required to run the site and a parameter used for tracking?

Or is this feature more advanced than just stripping known tracking parameter keys?

Doesn't even have to be a parameter. Could just be a unique URL slug for every link. Backend DB will map the slugs to a user + content

I believe Tiktok basically does that already.

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